


We built another world

by longnationalnightmare



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Anal Sex, Barebacking, Blowjobs, Cross-talk, Frottage, M/M, Pining, Rimming, Romance, Sharing a Bed, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-22 08:01:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 49,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13162701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnationalnightmare/pseuds/longnationalnightmare
Summary: "It occurs to Jon in his nineteenth minute of waiting for Lovett to join him downstairs that there’s no worse time in the history of their friendship for this to have happened."Favs and Lovett get snowed in.





	We built another world

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to all the slackers who chimed in during the chatfic that started me down my way-too-long road of writing this thing. It only took me ten years. This story would never ever ever ever ever ever ever be sitting in front of your eyeballs right now if not for the tireless miserying/cheerleading of professional fic doulas drunktuesdays, who broke my feet for my own good every damn day, and kalpurna, who heroically beta'd this behemoth through snow/travel trauma/gloom of night etc. without ever even snapping and coming to my home and murdering me about my semicolons. Bless you both to the moon & back.

_“Laura said faintly, 'I thought God takes care of us.'_

_'He does,' Pa said, 'so far as we do what's right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation.”_

_― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter_

 

The room Lovett managed to book while Jon was still fighting with Delta is located twenty minutes from the airport, in a rambling old Victorian two blocks from the Cathedral of St. Paul. It’s also, the woman at the front desk tells them, in easy walking distance of the F. Scott Fitzgerald house.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here?” Jon says. The woman looks blank, and then mildly offended.

“It’s a _very_ popular attraction,” she says reprovingly, and takes his credit card and driver’s license into the back office.

“Where even are we?” Jon asks, looking around the foyer at the polished molding and period furniture. “There weren’t any rooms available at, like, a Hyatt?”

“I tried like seven places before this,” Lovett says. Even in the middle of all this, his eyes are trained on his phone. Jon has a sinking feeling that, on top of everything else, he’s gonna get an earful from Tommy about how starting customer relations feuds on Twitter is the _opposite_ of brand-building. If he just doesn’t engage with Lovett’s Twitter feed—his own phone pings another notification that he refuses to look at—maybe he can plead ignorance. “And anyway,” Lovett adds, finally glancing up, “we only got _this_ room because someone cancelled literally two minutes before I called. They’re rerouting flights from Chicago. Apparently it’s already storming pretty bad south of here. This city is a zoo.”

“Cit _ies_. And I think you could have—” lowering his voice as the receptionist reappears and rounds the desk—“found _somewhere_ less—”

“Less _nice_?” Lovett says, letting her pick up his ratty backpack—unbelievable. “Trust me,” he says, a little ominously, as they head up the stairs, “if I could have found something different, I would have.”

Jon understands what he means as soon as the woman opens their (fantastically heavy) door and precedes them into the room. It is, Jon has to admit, what his grandmother might call a _beautifully appointed_ space: enormous paned wavy-glass windows, the outside world rippling a little through their depths; a neat brick fireplace set into one wall, unobtrusive flat-screen mounted above its mantel; a pair of mismatched antique chairs nearby, turned cozily towards each other; a gleaming cherrywood desk and matching armoire; a dresser; warm, worn rugs, and a barely-visible sliver of luxuriously large white clawfoot tub through the half-cracked bathroom door. Everything in the room is lovely and solid, opulent in the way old, simple things are: because they’ve aged into it, and because they know their purpose.

What dominates the decor, however—Jon should probably have seen it coming—is the bed, bed _singular_ , a stately four-poster, dark-stained wood polished to a high shine and gleaming against the long white interior wall of the room. One huge bed. One huge bed that hundreds—thousands—of couples have probably fucked in over the course of its lifetime. One huge fuckbed for him and Lovett to sleep in together: a bed that understands what it was made for.

“Well,” Lovett says brightly after the woman leaves. “I hope you don’t mind, but I do sleep naked.”

“ _Nowhere_ else?” Jon says after a stilted pause.

“Oh, I was _kidding_ ,” Lovett says. He hops up onto the bed and collapses onto his back. “The guy at the downtown Regency sounded like he was ready to start renting space on his apartment floor, I can call him back if you’d prefer—”

“Shut up,” Jon tells him. “I’m gonna shower. _Don’t_ ,” as Lovett starts to shift, “put those dirty shoes on the bed.”

“Yes, Dad,” Lovett says. He kicks them off, flinging them halfway across the room, instead, then pulls his feet up onto the mattress and goes back to staring at his phone.

The tub in the bathroom is so high, it turns out, that they’ve provided a special step-stool, carved to fit flush against one end of the curved porcelain, for the assistance of the vertically challenged; Jon doesn’t need it, but it occurs to him as he scrubs his neck, and behind his ears, relaxing a little under the heat and the pressure of the shower spray, that Lovett might, which makes him smirk. The bathroom floor, when he steps out of the tub, is heated. The towels are thick and soft. If it weren’t for the bed—

It’s a nice room. That’s all. Jon has to give it that.

“Tommy finally called,” Lovett says when Jon reemerges, steam billowing out of the bathroom behind him.

“Did he make it to New York?” Jon asks.

“Yeah,” Lovett says. “But he says we can’t scam our way into a per diem for our dirty weekend.”

“It’s not—goddammit,” Jon says, gives up, and gets his iPad out to call Tommy back.

Tommy’s also clearly in a hotel room when he answers Jon’s FaceTime, although his looks standard issue, a kind of flat beige blur like a halo around his head. The quality of the image is suspiciously grainy; Jon has a sinking feeling that the WiFi situation is gonna get dicey. “It was the only room available!” Jon says before Tommy can start talking.

“Just maybe keep the details to yourselves,” Tommy says. His voice is slightly distorted. “‘Obama Bros Shack Up in Bougie Twin Cities Love Nest’ isn’t the kind of headline we’re shooting for at the moment.”

“At the moment,” Jon repeats incredulously, and makes a face.

“Hey, Tommy,” Lovett says, leaning off the end of the mattress, trying to get his face in frame. “Can you hurry up? This bed is _really_ big and I’m _really_ lonely—”

“How long are flights grounded for?” Tommy asks, as if Lovett hasn’t spoken.

“It’s giving me _ideas_ , Tommy!”

Jon shrugs. “Not sure,” he says. “At least tomorrow, maybe longer—they’re expecting a couple of big storms in succession.”

“Tommy,” Lovett says again, leaning further and increasingly precariously off the bed, “we’d be sleeping on the airport floor if it weren’t for me. I should get a raise.”

“Definitely making a note in your file, bud,” Tommy says. “‘Rampant business trip over-expenditure,’ check.”

Lovett makes a face. “I go unappreciated in my time,” he says, scrambling gracelessly backwards. He looks rumpled and grotty against the clean white bedspread.

“Listen,” Jon says, “can you handle the meetings on your own?”

Tommy quirks one pale eyebrow. “Wow,” he says, deadpan, “I don’t know. It’s gonna be difficult to concentrate without you and Lovett slap-slap-kissing each other in front of all our tour sponsors, but sure, if I try really, _really_ hard, I might manage.”

“Ha ha,” Jon says, rote. “Okay, well, call and update me; I’ll keep working on—” but Tommy’s already shaking his head.

“Nah,” he says. He looks a little tired all of a sudden. “Take a snow day. It’ll all still be happening tomorrow. And the next day. And the next—”

“Okay, ray of sunshine,” Jon says. “We’ll let you know when we can get a flight out.”

“Sure,” Tommy says. Then, before hanging up, in an inscrutable tone that makes Jon’s ears flush: “Have fun.”

Jon plugs the iPad in to charge, noting the time as he does—almost 7:30, now, after all the hurry-up-and-wait that got them here—and noting, also, how badly he’d wanted to tell Tommy, _hang on_ , how he’d wanted to keep him on the line just a little longer, anything to be not quite alone with—

“Did you look up somewhere for us to eat?” he asks Lovett.

“What,” Lovett says, “you don’t think we can live on love alone?” When Jon shoots him a quelling glance, Lovett just smirks. “You’ve gotta admit,” he says, “it’s like we’re trapped in a bad romcom right now.”

“Lovett,” Jon says, “don’t be so—”

“Enchanting? Alluring? Irresistible?”

“Incorrigible,” Jon says. The back of his neck feels hot. “I’m gonna go ask for a rec at the front desk.” He has the feeling that if he could just get a minute—just _one minute_ —to himself—he might be able to get a grip on this situation. “Just—get ready to go and meet me down there,” he tells Lovett, not waiting for a response—picks up his phone and his wallet, grabs his coat, and—there’s no graceful way of putting it—flees.

 

 

It occurs to Jon in his nineteenth minute of waiting for Lovett to join him downstairs that there’s no worse time in the history of their friendship for this to have happened. He and Lovett have shared close quarters under strange circumstances before, and with more immediate stressors bearing down on them, too. Sharing a room with Lovett, sharing a bed with Lovett, spending a couple days holed up with Lovett and Lovett alone—none of it is new, and it shouldn’t, now, be weird.

Things have been a little different the past few months, though, and not just because they’re living in a mirrorverse.

Things like: Jon can’t stop looking at Lovett’s arms.

Their first year working together in the White House, Lovett got stung by a wasp in the Rose Garden. One second: gesticulating wildly, mid-rant. The next: cutting himself off, face screwed up in slow bemusement, saying, “I think—?” and raising his arm to inspect the sharp red pinprick in the crook of his elbow, the surrounding skin already beginning to raise and pink up. He’d seemed so confused that Jon had been forced to steer him back into the West Wing—“Haven’t you been _stung_ before? Do you even know if you’re allergic?”—and sit him down at his desk, plastering a handful of paper towels against the rapidly swelling sting site, had been forced to find a first aid box, feed Lovett two Benadryl, clean his arm off and smear some Cortizone a little over-liberally across the spreading rash.

“That’s _it_?” Lovett, having recovered himself somewhat, had said incredulously when Jon let go of him, and Jon ended up (“You’re such a drama queen—”) wrapping an entire roll of gauze around his whole arm (“Is that what you want, you big baby?”) so that when Axe came in to ask about some edits they were both giggling uncontrollably, Lovett yelping, “It _hurts_ ,” between bursts of laughter, his elbow so thickly encased in badly-applied bandages that he couldn’t bend his arm.

And Jon hadn’t—he’s ninety-nine percent sure—thought _once_ , through that whole ordeal, about the jut of Lovett’s wrist bone; the strange delicacy of his hands, his fingers; the hidden definition of his bicep, just out of sight.

If Lovett got stung by something now, he’d probably go into anaphylactic shock before Jon could finish deciding whether it might seem weird to touch him.

The whole problem, Jon’s pretty sure, is excessive proximity. He and Lovett spend too much time together. They work together, travel together; they eat together, drink together, walk their dogs together. Jon spends all day, every day working with Lovett and all night, every night hanging out with him, which is just—under circumstances like those, he thinks, anyone might start imagining themselves attracted to _anyone_ , and it wouldn’t mean they were, actually, in any real and enduring way. It might just be curiosity: the feeling of wanting to know that one last off-limits thing. Jon’s always been that way, the kind of person who likes neat, comprehensive dossiers; complete sets; collecting ‘em all.

On the other hand—

“I’m here!” Lovett’s voice rings out, and Jon turns to find him catapulting down the last few steps. What he spent twenty-something minutes doing, Jon has no idea—he’s wearing the same wrinkled outfit plus a coat, unzipped, and his hair looks somehow worse than before.

“Were you born in a barn?” he asks, instead of addressing any of this.

“Are you my mother?” Lovett asks back. He shoves his phone into his pocket. “Any more sitcommy catchphrases you want us to bandy back and forth, or we good? Let’s go, I’m starving.”

It’s snowing harder than it had been as they walk the few blocks to the gastropub the receptionist recommended. There are a couple inches on the ground already—it had barely started when their plane touched down. Jon’s flown through MSP before, passed through on the campaigns, but he’s never ventured far out into either of the cities. It’s weird, but trudging down the street right now, wind in his face, it doesn’t even feel like this is a real place. He’s inexplicably tired—well, maybe he’s understandably tired, given that he spent half his day sitting on planes and standing in lines and arguing with gate agents and customer service representatives and herding Lovett around with his face glued to his phone, directing him like you might a blinkered horse to keep it from walking into a tree, or the side of a barn, or an off-duty TSA agent.

“What do you think people do here?” Lovett asks out of nowhere as they trudge towards the restaurant.

“What?”

“Like—” Lovett gestures a hand demonstratively at their surroundings. “You know. Why do you move to Minnesota?”

“This is why the Democratic party is being called out-of-touch,” Jon says. But: “Lotta lakes,” he adds after a minute. “Fresh water, good fishing. No ocean to fall off into. No earthquakes.”

“Sure,” Lovett says. “Come for the cheese curds, stay for the apocalypse.”

“Five dollars,” Jon says. They feed their coffee fund with fines incurred for talking about the end of the world on company time.

“We’re in _Minnesota_ ,” Lovett says, and Jon says, “Don’t tell me you’re not gonna charge this to the company card, no matter _what_ Tommy says.”

“I’ll use the cash app,” Lovett tells him after a pause (the fucking liar) and bends his head against the wind.

 

 

Lovett orders a beer practically before their waitress can finish her welcome spiel. “Lovett,” Jon says, exasperated, but the waitress just laughs and turns to him. “I need a minute,” he tells her, and asks Lovett, “How did you choose so quickly?” when she’s swept off to another table. He stares down at the beer list. It’s four solid pages long.

Lovett shrugs. “I just scanned for the weirdest name,” he says. He scoots down his side of the booth to peer out the window as the wind picks up again, a thin howl Jon can hear even over the din of the restaurant.

Sometimes Lovett makes Jon wish he knew how to do math. There’s gotta be some equation—some grand unifying theory—that might make all his messy inconsistencies add up. “Your taste in beer,” Jon says, “is genuinely execrable. You drink the kind of beer a fifteen-year-old pays his older brother twenty dollars to buy for him at a gas station.”

“So?”

“So whatever you ordered,” Jon says, “you’re not gonna _like_.”

“Well, I liked the name,” Lovett says. He raps his knuckles on the tabletop and keeps looking out the window.

Jon turns this over as he peruses the menu. Lovett is some cursed cross between a creature of habit and a chaos demon. He wants exactly what he wants, what he _always_ wants, right up until the moment when, for no reason whatsoever, he doesn’t; he wants something else. The only thing he reliably _doesn’t_ want is to explain himself.

“I can choose for you, too,” Lovett says after a minute. His tone implies that he would be doing them both a favor.

“I’m looking,” Jon says.

“I could look _faster_ ,” Lovett tells him.

Jon takes a deep breath. “Lovett,” he says, “it’s not a crime to take your time.”

“Well,” Lovett says, “give it a couple of months.”

“Dark,” Jon says. He slides the drink list absently away from him, then draws it right back. Left to his own devices, Jon would probably ask the server for a recommendation. When he does that in front of Lovett, though, Lovett calls it “shameless” and tells him to “keep it in his pants.”

“Seriously,” Lovett says again, “I could—”

“I’m a grown man! I can choose my own drink!” Jon tells him. It comes out shirtier than intended.

“—I was gonna say, ask if they do, like, a scorpion bowl, but okay—”

Jon glances up to see Lovett’s face doing one of its standard squinches—half smile, half smirk. Back when they barely knew each other, it was the kind of expression that made Jon feel defensive, keyed up. Lovett would say something sharp, make some pointed observation, then shoot Jon a challenging look: _what are you gonna do about it?_ Now, Jon pretty much knows what Lovett’s thinking: _tell me I’m funny, tell me you like it._

It’s not a problem in the traditional sense, but it’s certainly problemat _ic_ how much Jon always _does_.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Jon tells him. “And anyway. They’re _good_.”

Lovett narrows his eyes. “Okay, sorori-bro,” he says. Then: “You can get like _ten kinds_ of tater tots here. Do I love the Midwest?”

“Maybe some good’ll come of this trip after all,” Jon says. He opens his own menu. “You’ll fall in love with Minnesota, move out here, and embed as our Middle America mole.”

“You’d miss me too much,” Lovett says. “Let’s get tater tot nachos, and don’t pretend you’re too virtuous to want ‘em.”

“I want ‘em, I want ‘em,” Jon says, holding his hands up in protestation. When the waitress comes back, he picks his own beer at random: just the first local offering on tap, an IPA. Lovett checks his copy of the drink menu for the description and reads it to himself. Jon can see his lips part a little as he scans.

“Boring,” he pronounces, pulling a face.

“That’s me,” Jon tells him, and changes the subject before Lovett can snatch the ball up and start to run with it.  

 

 

Lovett eats about fifty tater tots and spends most of dinner reading Jon articles about the Twin Cities. There’s almost nothing less comprehensively informative than listening to Lovett read articles aloud: he skips any parts he doesn’t find compelling, cutting off abruptly to scan for the next item of interest, and refuses to answer follow-up questions, no matter how many times, or how pointedly, you repeat them.

“Did you know that USA Today named St. Paul ‘the most romantic getaway in North America’ in 2014?” Lovett asks. He’s chewing a huge bite of burger in one half of his mouth, talking out the other.

“You’re disgusting,” Jon tells him.

“Sure,” Lovett says, “but is the romantic atmosphere counteracting that?” He waggles his eyebrows.

“Yup,” Jon says. “I find you irresistible.” He glances around for the waitress: he needs another beer.

“I knew it,” Lovett tells him, and shoves three tater tots into his mouth at once.

On their walk back to the B&B, they’re facing the cathedral. It’s gotten colder, and the wind has picked up; it’s blowing right at them, so sharp that it hurts a little bit to breathe. Inside the light of the street lamps, Jon can see snow, incredibly fine, like diamond dust, illuminating the eddies of air, and it’s the same when he peers much further ahead at the lit steeple of the cathedral, where he can see floodlights glaring up into the cloudy sky, snow singing in their beams. The cold stings Jon’s eyes; when they start to water, the tears freeze on his lashes. He rubs the ice away with a fist.

“I changed my mind,” Lovett says. Jon glances over at him. Lovett’s face is pinched, and the tips of his ears, poking out from above his coat collar, are painfully red. “I don’t like the Midwest after all.”

Lovett’s a grown man, improbable as it sometimes seems, and he can (mostly) take care of himself, provided he isn’t required to use a stove for anything more complicated than boiling water. But sometimes when Jon looks at him, he startles himself with his own messy, tender impulses. It was true even before the whole situation with the arms and the—whatever. “Shoulda worn a couple more layers,” he tells Lovett, who grimaces and says, “Have you ever in your _life_ passed up an opportunity to say, I told you—” but cuts himself off when he realizes that Jon’s unwinding his own scarf, bare skin prickling as the cold hits. Jon stops himself just short of looping it around Lovett’s neck—instead, he presses it towards Lovett, holding it out until Lovett accepts the offering, fingers grasping automatically at the soft cashmere.

“It’s just rude when you do stuff like this,” Lovett says, raising the scarf and knotting it around his neck anyway. They’re still trudging along, cathedral looming in the near distance.

“Like what,” Jon says.

“Like—” Lovett sounds legitimately frustrated. When Jon glances over, he can see Lovett’s breath clouding in front of his face. When he pulls the scarf across his mouth, the fog disappears. “Oh, hi, it’s me, handsome, chivalrous Jon Favreau, always hanging around waiting to lend a hand when you fall down.”

“I am not,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “ _Handsome?_ ” in tones of deep disbelief and Jon says, “Chivalrous! Or—hanging around waiting for you to fail. Especially not sartorially,” he adds, “because I would have been driven crazy a _long_ time ago.”

“Touche,” Lovett says. “Thanks, anyway.” He shoves his hands back into his coat pockets and falls silent.

Jon considers it as they take a left and wander past a row of Victorians, sensible even in their splendor out here in the frill-free Midwest, any architectural flourishes obscured beneath pristine mounds of snow, soft on every dormer and window-ledge and down the sloped, no-nonsense roofs. When Jon met Lovett for the first time, he was barely 26, and pricklier even than this. He assumed anything anyone said was intended to start a fight, and was inclined to oblige. He and Jon had gotten into it pretty badly a couple times before Jon figured out exactly how to handle him, or even started to understand where it came from: the bouncing-on-balls-of-feet, strike-before-struck, small-but-savage shtick.

“Dude,” Tommy had said at some point—the two of them out at a happy hour, shirt-sleeves rolled up, top buttons unbuttoned—listening to Jon painstakingly deconstruct one of these encounters (“I’m his _supervisor_ , you’d think—”). “The guy’s five-foot-nothing, gay, and can’t keep his goddamn mouth shut; no kidding he comes out swinging.”

“I”m not a _homophobe,_ ” Jon had said, a little lost, after staring at Tommy for a minute.

Tommy rolled his eyes. “No doy, Captain America,” he said, flagging the bartender and gesturing for two more beers. “I’m not saying you _gave_ him the complex, unless there’s something you haven’t told me about your history. I’m just saying he’s _got_ one.” He’d swallowed the dregs of his glass and said, “Can we please find some girls to flirt with instead of talking about Jon Lovett all night?” and Jon had shrugged, saying, “yeah,” and trailing Tommy towards a group at the other end of the bar, still lost in thought, puzzling it through.

Now, as they approach the porch of the bed and breakfast, Jon says, again, “I don’t think you need help. Usually.”

“Great,” Lovett says, and Jon says, “Well, we _all_ need help sometimes!”

“Just call on your brother,” Lovett says quothily, “when you need a hand.”

“You’re not my brother,” Jon tells him, knee-jerk.

“...Okay, weirdo.” Lovett vaults up the front steps before Jon can figure out how to clarify it—if there _is_ a way to clarify it—but they both have to stop just inside the doorway, anyway, to stomp the snow off their shoes. Lovett’s canvas sneakers are thoroughly soaked. He must be freezing, scarf or no scarf.

“You’re much smarter than Andy,” Jon says; then, “I mean, I love him, but—”

Lovett snorts. “I know _that_ ,” he says. “Do you have the key?”

“...No,” Jon says, “ _you_ have the—”

But Lovett’s grinning, apparently in good spirits again. “Gotcha,” he says, slipping his shoes off, and pads ahead of Jon in just his wet socks, all-American sneaks dangling from one hand, leading him up the stairs and back to the room.

The thing about Lovett is that he’s—Jon stares at the back of his head, the little hunch of his shoulders as he trails him down the hall—he’s just so—frustratingly changeable. What he wants one second, he might not the next, or, might _seem_ not to. Nine times out of ten, if you hand him a scarf when he’s cold, he’ll accept it as his due and won’t even say thanks; the tenth, he’ll take offense, and Jon isn’t always sure why, which only stings because he wants to know so badly. He wants to understand _everything_ about Lovett, and he almost wants—it’s such a ratty, selfish thought—to be the only one who does.    

 

 

Things it turns out Lovett didn’t pack: a toothbrush, another pair of shoes, any pajamas at all. “I wasn’t kidding about the sleeping naked thing,” he says. He holds up his shoes. “Where should I put these to dry?”

“You _said_ you were kidding,” Jon says.

Lovett glances over. “Uh, yeah,” he says, “because you looked like you were gonna have a coronary. You know, for a guy who tom-catted around DC like it was a paid side gig, you get astonishingly prudish sometimes.”

“I do not,” Jon says. He sounds like a second-grader.

“Where—should I put these—to dry?” Lovett asks again, slower.

“They’re not going to,” Jon tells him, a little spitefully, but Lovett just sighs and sets them on the windowsill anyway, then beelines for the bathroom.

“I’m gonna borrow your toothbrush,” he says, offhanded, casting the words back as he ducks through the door.

Jon, who’s removing items from his carry-on and sorting them on the bed, spins around. “You are _not_ ,” he says. “Lovett, that is so gross—”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Lovett calls from the bathroom. “It’s like—the toothpaste is literally washing the brush while you use it.”

“That’s not how toothpaste works,” Jon says. “It’s not, like, bleach. It’s just baking soda. Baking soda isn’t a disinfectant.” But Lovett doesn’t respond immediately, and when he reemerges, the barrel of Jon’s Sonicare is already sticking out of his mouth.

“Mrmphh,” Lovett says. When he removes the brush to try and speak more clearly, toothpaste drips down his chin and onto his chest. “Do you _want_ me to bleach it,” he says thickly, and when Jon pulls a face, he shrugs, shoves it back into his mouth, and turns it on.

“You’re a slob, by the way,” Jon says over the whirring. “How many shirts did you bring? Just that one?”

Lovett shrugs again and goes back into the bathroom. After a while, Jon can hear the brush turn off and the sound of spitting before Lovett reappears in the doorway, wiping his mouth off with the hem of his tee. His stomach is—

“They _provide towels_ ,” Jon says, pushing that thought away, but Lovett just grins, dropping his shirt back so that his belly button disappears again, and says, “Yeah, but using a towel won’t make you give me that look.”

Jon crosses his arms. “Here’s a psychological inquiry,” he says, and stops when Lovett, apparently in response, pinwheels one arm agreeably. “What are you _doing_?”

“I think like—winding up a pitch?”

Jon squints. “Why are—never mind. What do you think happened to you in your childhood—”

“Oh, brother,” Lovett says.

“—that makes you respond this way to disapproval?”

“What way?”

“The, like—running towards it way.”

“You think you can trick me into saying _yes_ to therapy,” Lovett says, “but you can’t. And the fact that you use that fucking Tom’s of Maine baking soda toothpaste in the first place is insane, by the way. It tastes like salt.”

“It’s—” As he speaks, Jon realizes that he’s not sure what, exactly, it is, which Lovett seems to read on his face.

“A _ha_ ,” he says. “LA’s turned you into a knee-jerk no-GMO holistic-health Whole-Foods hippie.”

“You know, I’m actually an excellent critical thinker,” Jon says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lovett says. “Your _brain_ says food scarcity is a complex multifaceted issue but your _heart_ says buy organic.”

“You live in LA, too,” Jon points out.

“You’re weaker-willed than me,” Lovett tells him, “on account of how you’re more handsome.”

“That must be it,” Jon says— _more handsome—_ just—and goes back to rummaging through his bag.

 

 

Jon brushes his teeth and thinks about Lovett’s mouth, then thinks about Lovett’s paradoxical personal boundaries (hugging, no; sharing a toothbrush, sure), then thinks about Lovett’s mouth some more, then wonders what it says about _him_ that his brain has, without permission, filed most of this evening in a folder with a big NC-17 label on the tab.

He contemplates his own personal Overton window for a little while. He definitely, he thinks, used to have pretty normal turn-ons, all things considered—low-cut tops, tight jeans, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—he used to be the kind of guy who’d click the back button on any XTube vid that got weird: no harm no foul, but weird just wasn’t for him. Now, he’s not really even fazing himself with the mental image—unrequested—of Lovett wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes and an American flag bikini top, standing on a beach, scowling, complaining about the feeling of sand between his toes.

“That’s what most people _like_ about the beach,” he tells Fantasy Lovett.

“I am not,” Fantasy Lovett says regally, “ _most_ people,” and sticks Jon’s toothbrush into his mouth as if to make a point.

 _Please don’t suck on the toothbrush,_ Jon thinks.

Fantasy Lovett shoots Jon a pitying look. _You should know better,_ his face says. _You asked for this,_ it says. _This is_ your _fantasy_ , it says.

Then he fellates the Sonicare.

Jon blinks at himself in the mirror. He’s been scrubbing the same quadrant of his mouth, methodically, for like a full minute. His gums feel a little raw.

“What are you doing in there?” Lovett shouts from the bedroom. “Drilling your teeth out? Come _on_ , I’m clothed, I promise—”

While Jon was in the bathroom, Lovett has piled an extra four pillows onto the bed so that he looks like a ruffled little hen in its nest, and he’s put on—“Is that my shirt?” Jon says.

“You brought, like, six,” Lovett says. He looks unrepentant. The t-shirt is tight across his chest and into his shoulders. Jon can see, barely, his peaked nipples through the thin fabric, the Holy Cross Crusaders logo stretched and slightly distorted over his pecs.

It’s cold in the room. Jon cuts his eyes purposefully away from the bed, scanning for his iPad—where did he _leave_ it—and pretends, just a little, against the fact that the sight of Lovett in one of his shirts makes him feel warm even with goosebumps prickling up on his forearms, makes his whole body seem to say, happy, _mine_ , _mine._

“Just—you can just wear a dirty shirt to bed,” Jon tells him. He scoops his iPad off an armchair and, steeling himself, proceeds across to the four-poster, climbs in next to Lovett.

“Okay, first, I hope this room is bugged and someone got that on tape for presentation in a court of law, because I’m gonna sue you for judgmental mixed-messaging, Mr. Didn’t-You-Wear-That-Shirt-Yesterday-You’re-Disgusting; and second, it wasn’t _dirty_ , it was _damp._ ”

“Because you used it as a—never mind.” One thing Jon’ll say for this place: the mattress is a dream. He groans a little involuntarily as he sinks back into it, and the silence that follows is articulate in its absoluteness.

“I hope,” Lovett says after a moment—Jon chances a glance over but can’t figure out what his face is doing—“that you plan to feature _that_ noise in a Helix ad at some point.”

“It’s why they hired us,” he says. He’s so warm, after all that time outside, that the sheets feel shockingly cool against his bare legs, and he’s pretty sure his face, the back of his neck, are flushed.

“Seriously,” Lovett persists, “what are you sleeping on back in LA? A punishing stone slab, or—”

“Lovett—”

“Do you want me to come over and test your mattress sometime? I mean, this is good but it’s not—”

“—shut up—”

“— _that_ good,” Lovett finishes, leaning over a little so that he’s peering down at Jon. “You just made a noise that shouldn’t be produced for anything short of sex, or 3D Jacked Doritos.”

“I’m _tired_ ,” Jon says, “shut _up_ ,” but he’s giggling in spite of himself. He grabs one of Lovett’s pillows and drops it onto his own face, and even then, he can’t escape the feeling that Lovett’s hovering over him, looking down at him. He can’t escape the squirming in his stomach that means he likes it.

 

 

Lovett’s been providing social media reportage on their misadventures all day. He’s spent the last fifteen minutes, while Jon tried and failed to focus on responding to emails, reading aloud offers of housing and company they’ve received from listeners in the greater Twin Cities area. “‘We’re having a snowstorm kiki, COME OVER. There’s a pull-out with your name on it ;)’” Lovett squints at his phone. “There’s an offer.”

“Tempted?” Jon asks, finally giving up and setting his iPad on the nightstand.

Lovett shrugs and swipes at his screen a couple times. “Well,” he says after a minute, “now I am.” He tilts the phone so that Jon can take a look at an enlarged Twitter avatar of a guy—good-looking guy, Jon thinks impassively—shirtless, arms flung around two equally shirtless but brutally cropped bros in snapbacks. “Let’s go party with Keith,” Lovett says, waggling the phone in Jon’s direction.  

“Pass,” Jon says.

“Killjoy,” Lovett says. “Keith seems _fun_.”

“Keith seems forward,” Jon says flatly. “Let’s just watch TV. If you put your phone down, I’ll let you choose the channel.”

“ _Let_ me,” Lovett scoffs, but he drops his Galaxy onto the bedside table and promptly reaches for the remote, grabbing at the air impatiently.

“Remember, Lovett,” Jon says, passing it over, “with great power—”

“We’re in a hotel room,” Lovett says, “how much harm can I do? I’ll get to choose between three infomercials, a Law and Order SVU marathon, and Spy Kids III.”

“I can’t wait to learn all about the Slap Chop.”

“Spoken like a man who already knows too much for my comfort.”

In fact, the channel package is pretty comprehensive, but Lovett flips right past CNN and MSNBC, and past ESPN and ESPN 2, too, even though Jon wouldn’t mind shifting to cruise control and watching some guys race up and down a field for an hour or so.  He doesn’t stop until he hits a movie Jon doesn’t recognize.

“Is that Cher?” Jon says.

Lovett shoots him a look and drops the remote onto the bed between them. It lies there looking up at Jon like a stern demarcation, determined to keep Jon honest: your side, my side. “It’s _Moonstruck_ ,” he says, “and it’s a classic.”

“Never seen it,” Jon says.

On-screen, Cher’s snapping, “It’s temporary!”

“Everything’s temporary!” a man with a squashed face replies.

Lovett kicks Jon’s shin. “You’re beautiful,” he tells Jon, “but an unfortunate side-effect of that fact is that you’ve never been forced to culture yourself. You can coast on your whole—face situation, you don’t even _have_ to be able to make conversation.”

“That makes me sound like yogurt,” Jon says. Then: “I make plenty of conversation!” Then: “ _Face situation_?”

Lovett turns his bedside lamp off and elbows Jon until, rolling his eyes, he does the same. “ _Not_ like yogurt,” he says, “which is _extremely_ cultured. And this is the second time this evening I’ve had to mention that it’s disingenuous to act affronted about an obvious compliment. You’re turning into the fame monster. Wanna find out how many lines I can do?”

“No,” Jon says, already watching, out of the corner of his eye, as Lovett leans toward the television, mouth opening.

Ten minutes later, Lovett’s standing on the bed shouting, “ _I lost my hand! I lost my bride!”_ in shockingly precise tandem with Nicholas Cage while Jon tries and fails to pull him down by his leg, laughing so hard he almost can’t breathe.

“Wait’ll she gets upstairs,” Lovett says, finally letting Jon tug him back onto the bed, collapsing with a big bounce and tucking his knees into his chest. “ _Then_ I’ll give you a real show.”

Sometime between _La bohème_ and the miraculous recovery of Johnny Cammareri’s mother, Lovett stops providing color commentary. When Jon turns to see what’s up, he’s fallen asleep, head tipped back onto his pile of pillows, mouth open. When he’s not screwing his face up into some wild expression, it’s clear how tired he is. There are lines faintly visible across his brow, even in repose. Jon climbs out of the bed and walks across to the window, even though the bare wood is cold on the soles of his feet, to twitch the curtains closed, then gets back under the covers and keeps watching the movie alone, glancing over now and then to look at Lovett; catching himself; forcing his eyes back onto the TV.

Lovett stirs a little around midnight. “You want it off?” Jon asks, lowly, when he twists onto his side and blinks one eye open.

“Uh-uh,” Lovett mumbles. He throws an arm out, knocking the remote into Jon’s leg. No more line. Jon can feel Lovett’s fingers, loosely curled, brushing against his thigh. “‘s almost over.”

“Okay.”

Jon has always, his whole life, been a guy who knows what he wants. His desires aren’t static; they shift and change. But he knows how to identify the tipping point between _maybe_ and _yes_ , and he knows how to take action, almost immediately, when the latter manifests.

The only thing he knows about Lovett, though, is that he won’t risk him—can’t—and that what he wants, absolutely and unquestionably, is not to lose him.

“Do you love him, Loretta?” Lovett murmurs into the mattress. He’s a half-beat off. His hand twitches against Jon’s leg. “Aw, Ma, I love him awful.” Then, frowning, he kicks his legs out the bottom of the blankets and turns over again, so that he’s sprawled on his stomach, hugging the pillows.

The problem with having a problem with Lovett is that Lovett’s the person Jon _goes_ to with his problems. It feels unnatural not to turn right over, sock Lovett in the arm, and say, “Hey, I need a hand.” When Jon closes his eyes and thinks about how to solve something, he pictures Lovett, perched on his kitchen counter, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, eating salted almonds and interjecting to say, “This is a non-issue,” and, “you’ve gotta be kidding me,” and then, with a kind of perfect carelessness, as if it couldn’t be easier, illuminating exactly why Jon’s so bent out of shape, so that he can figure out how to fix it.

Lovett knows Jon. Lovett helps Jon to know himself.

 _Hey,_ Jon thinks at the other side of the bed, _I need a hand._

Lovett snorts in his sleep and burrows his face further into a pillow.

The movie ends; the music swells. Jon turns the TV off. The room seems impossibly dark for a minute or two, and then, as Jon lies there, he starts to see through the murk again, shapes coming clear: the wardrobe, the fireplace, the bedposts, the faint line where the curtains meet, outside which the weather is contriving to keep them here.

He closes his eyes. Lovett’s sitting on the counter. He’s wearing the baseball cap and—not _again_ , Jon thinks, squeezing his eyes shut harder—the bikini top _and_ the Daisy Dukes, and he’s eating, not particularly alluringly, a Rocket Pop. He bites the tip off with relish and red syrup drips down his hand and arm. “Hey,” he says, and then, “you’re a real freak, huh,” snapping the right strap of the bikini.

“I didn’t—”

“Save it,” Fantasy Lovett says. Then: “Actually, don’t. Do you think it might be, like, meaningful that you keep imagining me in women’s clothes? You wanna run that one by your subconscious?”

“You _are_ my subconscious.”

“Great, then I agree with myself—something something masculinity something something sexuality something something—eh, never mind, I changed my mind, who cares.”

Jon turns over onto his side. The sheets beneath him are crisp and rustle when he moves. “What do I do?” he asks Fantasy Lovett.

Fantasy Lovett looks unimpressed. He takes another bite off the top of the popsicle. “Well,” he says, in that particular joking-if-you-want-me-to-be tone that drives Jon up the goddamn wall, “Trump’s president—there’s no time to waste—”

“Lovett—”

“I really do take it all back—” and suddenly he’s examining himself in a mirror, craning to check out his own ass, first, in his short-shorts, then turning to size up his star-spangled chest, saying, “I get the whole Sports Illustrated thing, now, I look bomb in this outfit,” and flexing both arms in turn, kissing his biceps, which is around the time Jon realizes that he’s drifting off and stops trying to make things make sense.

“Good luck with all that,” Fantasy Lovett adds, glancing back over his shoulder, eyes suddenly huge, lashes long, and keeps watching dispassionately as Jon falls asleep.

 

 

Jon wakes to the discovery that Lovett has, in the night, flipped a hundred and eighty degrees in the bed, so that his head is at Jon’s feet. Furthermore, he’s stolen all the blankets and bundled himself so thoroughly inside them that nothing’s visible except a tuft of his hair. Faint snoring emanates from inside the burrito.

Jon, of course, is cold.

After Jon’s showered and dressed, Lovett still shows no signs of stirring, so Jon ventures downstairs alone. There are two couples in the dining room, both middle-aged, seated at their own little tables, engaged in sedate conversation, and when the waitress comes out to pour Jon a coffee and take his order she says, smiling, “Alone?” so that Jon feels more keenly than he cares to the contrast between his own situation and his breakfast companions’.

Still. He shoots her a tired grin in response. “Lovett’s not exactly an early riser at the best of times,” he says.

She laughs. “Yeah,” she says, “my husband’s the same way. We went to Paris last summer for our honeymoon and I swear he spent half the trip sleeping. It’s like, why don’t you stay home and I spend your airfare on a private tour of the catacombs and a shopping spree on the Champs Elysées? But it wouldn’t be as fun without ‘em, huh?” she adds, almost conspiratorially.

“Nah,” Jon says after a moment. “It wouldn’t.”

Jon’s halfway through both his French toast and an article about the ACA by the time Lovett finally staggers into the dining room. He’s dressed, albeit barely, and sporting a bleary, crabby expression that clears a little when he spots Jon—no—when he spots, Jon realizes a minute later, Jon’s _coffee_ , which he bears down on with furious purpose, flinging himself into a chair and snatching the mug up in one precarious motion.

“Good morning, Lovett,” Jon says. “Of course you can have some of my coffee.”

Lovett snorts mid-sip, splashing coffee onto his— _Jon’s_ —t-shirt. He takes another, deeper swig, then puts the cup down. “This is cold,” he says in a disgruntled tone, “and _sweet,_ ” but the waitress is already zipping over, flipping the cup at his place setting, and filling it with a cheerful, “Morning!”

“You run a wonderful establishment,” Lovett says, wrapping his hands around the cup and looking up at her. “I’ll give you many stars on Yelp.” The waitress laughs. “Jon’s coffee was cold and gross,” Lovett adds, “so he won’t be getting any stars, on Yelp or otherwise.”

“Aw,” she says, “I’m sure he’ll find a way back into your good graces.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Lovett tells her frankly, and orders pancakes _and_ an omelette for breakfast.

The dining room is cozy—cozier now that Lovett’s here, and Jon isn’t the only person in it eating alone. Through the huge bay window at one side of the room, Jon can see snow still falling outside, and there’s a fire roaring in the old-fashioned parlor across the hall. Lovett keeps stealing bites of French toast off Jon’s plate—“You have _two breakfasts_ coming—” in between bouts of scathing commentary on his Twitter feed, Jon giggling so much that he has to keep saying, “Stop, I can’t swallow,” thickly through mouthfuls of food. Lovett looks impossibly pleased to be getting such an intemperate response. He leans in to steal a strawberry from Jon’s plate, and eyes Jon contemplatively as he pops it into his mouth.

“Do you think I could make you choke?” he asks, adding, “with _laughter,_ ” when Jon promptly proves that he can.

“You’re literally,” Jon tells him, still spasming a little, holding a napkin to his mouth, “dangerous to be around.”

“Please,” Lovett says, “save the extravagant praise for my book jacket.”  

There’s a take-a-book leave-a-book shelf tucked into the alcove outside the dining room. Lovett stops to browse as they’re leaving breakfast, waving Jon ahead, and comes back to the room with a whole stack, telling Jon, “This hotel has _everything_ ,” as he dumps his haul onto the bed. He’s unearthed a battered copy of _Holidays in Hell_ , a self-help book entitled _Rich Dad, Poor Dad_ (“—we run a company now, maybe a little fiscal advice is in order—”), _two_ copies of _The Fountainhead_ (“—in case you wanna read it with me—”), an 80s era value bind-up of _Flowers in the Attic_ and _Petals on the Wind_ and a yellowed deck of cards. “What I’ve learned,” he says, crossing his arms and inspecting this spread, “is that people who stay at bed and breakfasts are rich libertarian perverts.”

“I’m not reading _The Fountainhead_ with you,” Jon tells him.

Lovett waves dismissively. “Give it another day,” he says. “We’ll see how circumstances wear on you.”

Jon spends thirty minutes _still_ not answering the emails he couldn’t answer the night before while Lovett, lying on the floor with his legs propped up on an armchair, holds _Flowers in the Attic_ above his face and reads increasingly protracted excerpts aloud in an incredulous tone. “My sister read this when she was, like, _eleven_ ,” he says, flipping forward and bringing the book closer to his face. “Listen to this—”

“Don’t you have any work to do?”

Lovett props the book open on his chest and looks over at Jon. “No,” he says. “Why, do you?”

“None that I can concentrate on during Reading Rainbow,” Jon says pointedly, but Lovett just snorts and picks the book back up.

“I’m on vacation,” he says. “Listen—”

“Lovett—”

“This week sucked,” Lovett says, lowering the book again. He looks mulish. “And now I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere—”

“It’s the 46th largest city in America,” Jon says, “ _you’re_ the one who _told_ me that—”

“—with only a rank pedant for company—” Jon opens his mouth to interject again but Lovett zips the air. “And at any moment my phone could ring—” pause for effect, but—“well, it’s on silent. But _metaphorically_ it could ring the bell for the end of the—”

 _“—_ five dollars—”

“—world any second now so can’t I just have—”

 _“Fine_ ,” Jon says, and drops his iPad on the mattress next to him. “Fine. We’ll take the day off.”

 

 

Of course, once they’re off the clock, neither of them can decide what to do.

“If we weren’t trapped in a snowstorm,” Jon says, “we could go see Prince’s house.”

“Prince who?” Lovett says, and smirks when Jon opens his mouth to respond.

“ _You’re_ the culture alien,” Jon says anyway.

“Take me to your leader,” Lovett intones. “Or—actually—don’t,” which makes Jon laugh and then groan a little, and sends both of their hands to their phones, “just in case,” Lovett says, thumbing the screen.

“In case of _what_ ,” Jon says, even though he’s checking _his_ phone too, the impulse ingrained: remember how weird the world is now; check to see how much weirder, how much worse, it’s gotten in the five minutes since last you looked.

“Catastrophe,” Lovett says, giving voice to this fear. He sounds blithe, but when Jon glances up, he’s frowning at his screen, hunched forward in the armchair, elbows on his knees. Eventually, though, he rises again, paces back and forth before the fireplace a few times, then crosses to peer out the window and says, “Well, we’re not _trapped_ —”

Jon blinks at him. “Okay?”

Lovett turns back into the room. “Let’s just go out,” he says in sudden, decisive tones.

“ _You_ wanna go outside?” Jon says skeptically.

“I’m intrepid,” Lovett tells him. He looks affronted. “Hello, I hike.”

“In Hollywood,” Jon says, but Lovett just huffs and says, “Get dressed,” and where Lovett goes—well.

The thing about going outside: West Coast weather is one thing and East Coast weather is another, but the Midwest is something else entirely, and not exactly what either of them came prepared for. For Jon, unprepared means he wishes he’d brought a heavier coat, maybe a thicker pair of socks. For Lovett, it means he doesn’t appear to have packed with the intention of comfortably sojourning _anywhere_ in the northern hemisphere. “What were you gonna do in New York?” Jon asks, lacing his own boots and glancing disbelievingly at Lovett’s canvas stars and stripes sneakers, thin fabric still damp from the night before.

“Not walk in snow,” Lovett says dismissively. He’s already shoved his feet into the shoes, and he’s loitering near the door with his hands stuffed into his coat pockets. At least he _has_ one, Jon thinks, even if he is only wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt under it. “Is that so unrealistic?”

“Just kind of dumb,” Jon tells him, and grins at the floor when Lovett bristles in response.

Down in the lobby, the receptionist agrees—unprompted—about their apparel. “Honey,” the receptionist tells Lovett as soon as he catapults off the stairs, “not to tell you your business, but if you’re going outside for more than five minutes, you’re gonna freeze to death.”

“We were supposed to be in New York,” Jon says, looking over at Lovett.

“I could put socks on my hands,” Lovett says, as if this suggestion might be considered genuinely helpful.

“Oh, you’d like that,” Jon says nonsensically, just as the woman says, “We have a lost and found—”

Lovett finds a pair of boots that just about fit (“My toes are cramped,” he says sourly, and Jon says, “Good, maybe it’ll temper you—”) and that seem to have been patched with duct tape in two places, as well as a set of mismatched gloves—one neon pink Gore-Tex, the other soft brown leather. The receptionist, loitering nearby, says, “You need another layer,” in a kind of grim, motherly way.

Jon who’s been bent over digging through the pile of spare socks and scarves and ski caps, straightens up. “Just go get your sweater,” he tells Lovett.

“I’ll be fine,” Lovett says. He looks ridiculous in the clashing gloves and the seen-better-days Redwings and his maroon jeans. He makes Jon’s heart clench.

“It’s ten degrees out,” the receptionist admonishes.

“Last night—” Jon starts.

“I’ll be _fine_ —”

“Lovett,” Jon says, “if you don’t go put another layer on, I’m gonna drag you upstairs and do it for you.”

There’s a shocked little moment in which Jon’s looking at Lovett and Lovett’s looking at Jon and Jon can’t decide whether he actually said that, or whether he imagined he said it, and he can’t figure out, either, whether Lovett looks angry or—he certainly looks _startled_ , Jon thinks. His eyes are wide.

“Okay,” he says finally, raising his hands a little in defeat, “don’t threaten me with a good time—”

Jon reorganizes the lost and found while Lovett’s upstairs. He folds all the scarves and sweaters and jackets, listening with half an ear to the wind outside the parlor windows, the receptionist chatting on the phone, and matches all the mittens and gloves as best he can, pairs several mismatched but not dissimilar lone right and left boots. The effort is for nothing anyway, because as soon as Lovett clatters back downstairs, pulling at the soft cashmere with a pointed look as if to say, _alright? alright already?_ , he shoves his hand right into the newly neat bin and messes it right back up, rummaging blithely around and fishing out a scarf.

“So you don’t have to sacrifice for my comfort again,” he tells Jon in a mocking tone. Jon rolls his eyes and—not that he’d been holding off on _purpose_ —finally loops his own scarf around his neck.

Lovett’s borrowed scarf is magenta. It’s been knitted in big frills that ruff around his neck so that he looks like a tropical lizard, or Elizabeth I dressed up for the Women’s March.

“Well?” Lovett says, peering at himself in a dim antique mirror. “Cool?”

“Never cooler,” Jon says, and fingers the end of his own scarf, and says, “let’s go.”

 

 

The cathedral is the easiest thing to find, so that’s where they go first, trudging the six or so blocks to the building and then, Lovett grumbling and clinging to the railing ahead of him, up a flight of slick stone steps to the arched entryway. Inside, Lovett peels off to explore alone with shockingly little fuss. Jon stands by the door watching as he prowls down one aisle, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, peering up at the painted dome.

He hesitates, then dips his finger in the holy water font and crosses himself. Someone’s playing the organ. It echoes through the space. When Jon takes a couple steps forward and looks up, he can see, barely, the ranks up in the gallery, neat rows of pipes. Jon isn’t generally interested in cathedrals, but he can’t deny that like any church, this feels familiar, and comforting, especially now, in a world where so much that he took for granted is gone or changed. He knows that’s its own trick; religion isn’t now what it was for him as a child. Nothing stays the same.

Still.

Instead of following Lovett all the way to the front of the cathedral, Jon walks halfway down the aisle and slides into a pew. He picks up a hymnal from the holder on the back of the seat in front of him and flips it open. There’s a _Dedicated in Memory of…_ bookplate on the interior of the front cover; Jon traces the name inscribed there in slanted cursive with the tip of his finger.

When Jon looks up, Lovett’s sitting, too, perched on the stone altar rail in front of the sanctuary staring impassively at his phone. He looks tiny, dwarfed on all sides by enormous pillars and archways. From where Jon’s sitting, the ornate dome enclosing the altar, set back on the dais behind Lovett, looks like a comically oversized crown perched atop his head. With his curls and his red cheeks, he looks a little like a cherub plucked from some heavenly stained glass scene and plopped nose-first into the twenty-first century—or, when he grimaces suddenly, kicking a foot against the pillar beneath him, like a comic gargoyle.

Lovett looks up and catches him staring. When Jon waves, a small, stupid gesture, he hops off the post and puts his hands to his mouth like he’s gonna shout. Jon knows he won’t—well, he’s _pretty_ sure he won’t—but he starts to laugh anyway, the sound echoing up into the dome, and Lovett, grinning, puts a finger to his lips: _shhhhhh_.

If Jon made a list of places Lovett has made him inappropriately laugh, it would be five pages long, maybe more. Once, when they were both still in the White House, Jon sat by and watched Axe upbraid Lovett six ways to Sunday over some remark made at a bad time, in bad taste; and watched also when, Lovett having intoned some glib acknowledgement of the rebuke and fled, Axe rubbed his forehead and released a pent-up grin into the visor of his hand. “I swear to God,” he told Jon, “that idiot’s gonna make me laugh at a funeral, someday, and they’re gonna have to put two bodies in the ground.”

“He’s funny,” Jon had said—mild agreement, he thought, but Axe dropped his hand and shot Jon a disbelieving look.

“Oh, _you_ think so, too? Never noticed,” he told Jon acerbically, and left.

What Jon doesn’t have, when it comes to Lovett, is an off switch. It’s all ingrained. Lovett makes a joke: Jon laughs. Lovett waves his hands like, _look at me_ : Jon _looks_.  

“Don’t make a scene,” Lovett says now, smug smile in place.

“Fuck you.” Jon slides out of the pew and walks with Lovett back towards the entrance, slowing as he passes a side-chapel to poke his head in and peer around. There’s a donation box by the statue of Mary. You can pay a dollar to light a votive and say a prayer, but Jon doesn’t. He goes outside, where Lovett’s waiting, stomping his feet dramatically and watching the snow.

“Did you make a good one?” he asks. “Or is it like wishes: you can’t tell?”

“I didn’t even—” Jon says, and then, “Not that it’s any of your _business_.”

“Legally,” Lovett tells him, “ _everything_ you do is my business.”

“That’s definitely not how incorporation works,” Jon says, but Lovett’s already turned to fix his eyes on his own feet as he descends the stairs again. It’s startling to watch Lovett do carefully something you’ve seen him do carelessly a million and one times before. He doesn’t usually, Jon realized a long time ago, like to be caught trying. Jon had seen him perch on the edge of someone else’s desk, twitchy and distractive, twenty times at least before he passed his office late one night and saw him actually writing—so involved, brow creased and scowling, that he didn’t notice Jon lingering in the doorway, taking him in.

Even now, when Jon enters a room and finds Lovett bent truly to some task, he only ever seems peevish and defensive about the intrusion, saying, immediately tense, “ _What_?” Or: “Do you need something?” in a tone that suggests only an idiot would say _yes_.

Lovett stops at the bottom of the stairs and waits for Jon to step off as well. “Do you ever,” he says.

“What?”

Lovett shrugs jerkily. “I don’t know.”

“Sure,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “I don’t _know_ ,” again, pricklier; glances back at the cathedral as they keep walking away. Jon looks back, too. It’s just cold enough—just shocking enough, after the relative warmth of the building—that when he breathes in, he starts to cough.

“ _Please_ don’t catch a cold while we’re sharing a bed,” Lovett says.

If Lovett started coughing, Jon would pound his back. Or—he’d want to pound his back, but wouldn’t, because Lovett wouldn’t _want_ it—or because Jon would want it too much—or—

“Seriously,” Lovett says, “when you go into one of those places—”

“A church?” Jon ventures dryly.

“Sure,” Lovett says. “Do you think about—like, _I_ go right to Martin Sheen shaking a fist at the big guy, but—”

“Lovett,” Jon says, “are you trying to ask if I believe in God?”  

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Lovett says.

Actually, neither of them is pulling a salary right now, but that doesn’t feel like the right place for Jon to rest his eyes. “That’s a weird question,” he says instead.

“Is it?”

“I just said it was,” Jon tells him. The freshly-fallen snow is soft underfoot, and when Jon glances up at the white sky, he almost expects to see a plane, small and distant, cutting through the thick clouds, saying, hey, you can go home after all—you don’t have to do this anymore—you don’t have to keep thinking about any of this. But of course there’s nothing there. He has the feeling that if he could reach all the way up, through the snow and static, he’d end up tapping glass, cold and prohibitive; that he’d find something holding them in.

“I don’t see it,” Lovett says.

Jon glances at him sidelong. “Okay,” he says. “What if I asked _you_?”

“Asked me what?”

“Asked you—”

“I _know_ ,” Lovett says. “I’m being difficult.” Then: “It’s not that hard. I don’t think it’s that hard.”

“You _are_ being difficult,” Jon says. Sometimes, when he’s talking to Lovett, he _means_ to sound severe—he’s pretty sure he does—but comes off as indulgent instead. It was probably more of a problem when he was supposed to be Lovett’s boss— _was_ Lovett’s boss, good grief—and shouldn’t matter much now, except when it makes him feel like he’s walking around without pants on.

“It’s multiple choice,” Lovett says. “You did okay on your SATs, right? You can handle that?”

“Better than you, I bet,” Jon says. Lovett opens his mouth immediately, like he means to object, then squints instead.

“Irrelevant,” he says.

“Hmm,” Jon murmurs, and grins into his collar.

“It’s _easy_ multiple choice, even,” Lovett soldiers on. “Two options. A, B. Yes, no.”

“ _You_ answer the question, then,” Jon says.

“I asked you first—”

“You’re a child—”

“You believe,” Lovett says stubbornly, “or you don’t believe. Or you,” smiling lopsidedly so his cheek is half dimple, “ _want_ to believe,” and starts humming the theme song, which is so impossible for Jon to deal with that he can’t do anything but stoop mid-step to scoop up a handful of snow, cram it cooly into Lovett’s collar, under his scarf, and dart out of reach when he yelps, trying to wriggle away from the cold and lunge back at Jon in the same spastic movement. “ _Bully_!” Lovett yelps, pointing at Jon, a few full steps ahead and jogging backwards, grinning helplessly.

“You were asking for it,” he says, voice cutting sharply through the peace and quiet of the neighborhood.

“ _Now_ we see the violence inherent in the system!”

“Write your own lines,” Jon says, and Lovett emits an inarticulate shriek of accusation before bulling forward again, batting his ruffled scarf back over his shoulder when it slips off to dangle practically to his feet. “And don’t _slip_ ,” Jon adds, skipping backwards, laughing when Lovett tries to stomp his foot mid-step and stumbles a little on the sidewalk.

“Oh, you’d like that—” Lovett says.

“Well…” Jon says, like he’s thinking about it. Lovett squawks again. His face is red with cold and exertion, and his eyes are bright, and Jon’s throwing his head back, laughing, thinking involuntarily about the snow melting on Lovett’s neck, trickling down his back, touching Lovett where Jon never gets to, _creepy_ , but still—

“I’m gonna catch you,” Lovett says, side-stepping an icicled fire hydrant, “and then—”

“What? You’re gonna what?” It occurs to Jon suddenly that he genuinely doesn’t know. If Tommy were chasing him, Jon would be bracing himself to get socked hard. He’d be glancing back over his shoulder to clock the terrain, ready to wrestle a little, to roughhouse. Lovett, though… Jon’s known Lovett for almost ten years and sometimes Lovett still refuses to throw an arm round him in photos. If Lovett catches him—

Lovett seems to realize the same thing at the same moment. He looks startled, even though he’s still advancing, his face suddenly slack. His lower lip is chapped. Jon isn’t laughing anymore, and he can’t stop looking at Lovett. He wants to stop backing away, stop playing, plant his feet and wait for Lovett to careen into him. He wants to grip his arm and say, _you’re supposed to know more about this than me_ , and, _what does this_ mean, and, _what am I to you_?

Instead, he keeps jogging, eyes fixed on Lovett’s face, until Lovett startles again and says, “Jon, stop—” which is when he feels his heel catch on something. He tries to brace himself against the fall, but he has good momentum, and the ground is slick—he’s gonna go down, he is—

—and then he isn’t. Something has a hold on him—no—someone—Lovett’s holding onto his forearm, tugging tight to hold him up, tight enough that Jon stumbles forward instead of back, right into the orbit Lovett usually refuses to let anyone access.

“ _You_ don’t slip,” Lovett says breathlessly. From running, Jon thinks. His chin is tipped up a little so that he can look Jon in the eyes. Jon can see his breath emerging in short, sharp bursts.

“Okay,” Jon says, but Lovett’s already saying, “If you crack your head open, I’ll have to fly your corpse back to LA, and I _refuse._ ”

“...Maudlin,” Jon says.

“A huge hassle,” Lovett corrects, “which you’d know if you’d ever watched _Lost_ —”

“What—”

“And I’d have to tell your parents,” Lovett says. “I don’t _wanna_ tell your parents you split your skull on a slick sidewalk in stupid St. Paul and I watched you bleed out while I waited for an ambulance to make it through the storm—”

“Uh-huh,” Jon says.

“Holding you in my arms!” Lovett says. “Watching the life fade from your eyes! And having to look Barack Obama in the face at your funeral and tell him I let you die!”

“To be fair,” Jon says, “you don’t have any medical training, so—what could anyone reasonably expect you to do?”

“You don’t know, I could have been a lifeguard in my youth,” Lovett snaps.

Jon shoots him a skeptical look. “I like that Obama comes to my funeral,” he says, instead of addressing that.

“Oh, of course you do.” Lovett finally unclenches his hand and takes a step back. There’s something shocking about the inverse of his grip, the lightness of the letting go. Jon shoves his hands back into his coat pockets.

“I’ll try not to die,” he says, falling into step beside Lovett again.

Lovett’s cheeks are red from the cold. “How generous,” he says, and Jon says, “I think that’s pretty reasonable,” and Lovett says, “You _would_ ,” and swerves a little to side-check him. It’s starting to snow again.

“God,” Lovett says after a moment of quiet walking, heads bent together against the wind, “what a nightmare.”

“What?” Jon says.

“You,” Lovett says, “dying.”

“Thanks?” Jon says.

“We just founded a company,” Lovett says. “The whole _concept_ is based on a triple-act. Two guys…”

“Oh,” Jon says.

“I am simply saying,” Lovett says. He pulls his hands out of his coat pockets and shoves them under his armpits. “If you die—”

“I’m not going to die—”

“Yes, I know, you’ll _try_ not to,” Lovett says. “But if you _do_ , you’re gonna look all, y’know—”

“No,” Jon says, “I do _not_ know—”

Lovett squints in his direction. “Handsome and electable,” he says, “like a Kennedy, in an open casket. In a cathedral,” he adds, “which is ironic—”

“It’s not—” Jon says.

Lovett waves him off. “People will _call_ it ironic.”

“If I _had_ died just now,” Jon says. “Which, again, I didn’t.”

“Stop trying to derail me,” Lovett says. “You’ll look all entering-his-prime, greying-at-the-temples—”

“ _Hey,_ ” Jon snaps.

“—coulda-been-a-contender, lying there surrounded by lilies, America’s favored, fallen son—”

“I’m a _podcast_ _host_ ,” Jon protests.

“Well, you _could’ve_ had it all!” Lovett says. “Everybody’s gonna see that when you’re dead! And Obama’s gonna cry at the viewing, and Crooked Media will fully take off in the wake of your untimely demise, and I’ll have to answer _all_ the emails _and_ do all the other stuff I hate to do—”

“That’s everything—”

“I _know_!”

“Why can’t Tommy answer some emails?”

“Tommy’s gonna be too sad to do anything,” Lovett says. “He’s gonna get all lean and gaunt and beautiful like a retired racing greyhound, and someone’s gonna pay him three million dollars to write a memoir about your friendship, and he’ll get to go on Oprah and everyone’ll find his book under their seat—”

“Just the book?”

“—and a car, _I_ don’t know—meanwhile, _I_ , fueled by the stress of running a company, am gonna gain twenty pounds—no—thirty—I’m gonna eat _nothing_ but In-N-Out and gain _forty_ pounds and my face is gonna get all puffy again, which is half the reason I left the fucking White House in the first place, _and_ I’ll get acne, and when I try to sleep at night, my ancestors are gonna visit me in my dreams and say, why are you letting yourself go to seed on account of a good-for-nothing goy who couldn’t just watch his step on the ice—”

“Hey—!”

“Them, not me! And then I’ll die of heart disease and I’ll look so horrible that _I_ won’t even be able to have an open casket, even though all I did was work myself to death while _you_ bashed your own brains in!”

“In this scenario,” Jon says, “are you at all sad about me, or—”

“My _looks_ ,” Lovett says aggrievedly.

“Yeah,” Jon says, “okay. For the record, you don’t seem very clear about whether my death is gonna tank the company or prove to be a net positive.”

“I’m hungry,” Lovett says, “I need something to eat. Thinking about this made me very, very hungry.”

They pass a deli (closed) and a pizza place (closed) and finally stumble onto an open stretch of stores, none of which sell food, but one of which, when they poke their heads in, has a little bowl of mints on the counter. “Listen,” Lovett says in an undertone, poking through a rack of keychains, “I’ll distract the cashier with a question at the other end of the store, you empty the bowl.”

“Why do I have to do the emptying?” Jon asks.

“Are you kidding?” Lovett whispers, wheeling to fix him with a disbelieving stare. “Because you look like the kind of customer who gets asked to keep an eye on things for a minute while the cashier runs out for a coffee, while _I_ look like the kind of customer who gets pointedly told that everything in the store is outside his price range.”

“Aw, Lovett,” Jon says, “are you still mad that I got paid so much more than you in the White House?”

“I am not,” Lovett says, “because I know you don’t have the fiscal sense God gave a block of concrete, and that no matter _how_ much money you make, you’ll find a way to destitute yourself before you reach middle age.” Then: “This is off topic. I have a plan. I need you to assist me.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jon says, and raises his voice: “Ma’am? Do you mind if we have a mint?”

 

 

Back in the cold, pockets full of candy, Lovett scowls as they keep ambling down the street. “I bet you feel like a _big_ provider,” he says. He manages to make it sound accusatory.

“Yup,” Jon says placidly, and crunches his mint in half.

“Ugh,” Lovett says, but it’s neither clear nor convincing: he’s sucking on four candies at once, his cheek bulging unevenly with them. He looks like a cranky chipmunk. “It’s gross how likable you look,” he says thickly, unwrapping another mint and shoving it into his mouth.

“I don’t know,” Jon says, flexing his fingers in his jacket pockets. “I think it kinda works out for you.”

Lovett doesn’t say anything for a long, strange second. Then: “You’re right. Where would I be without my clean-cut, all-American co-founders—”

“I just meant—”

“—my office eye candy—”

“—Lovett—”

“—the faces no one can say no to,” Lovett says. “Let’s look in here,” he adds, gesturing at an antique store just ahead. “Maybe they’ll be handing out roast beef sandwiches at the register.” When Jon doesn’t move, Lovett pulls a face. “Chill out,” he says easily. “I like riding your coattails. It’s exhilarating.”

“Extra mayo, right?” Jon asks.

Lovett’s grin is lopsided. It makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “See?” he says. “You get me.”

The store smells kind of musty. Jon trails Lovett as he pokes through various piles of junk, occasionally shoring them up when, their structural integrity compromised, they threaten to tip over in his wake. “Maybe,” Lovett says after a few quiet minutes, riffling through a flat of old postcards, “if I asked for mints in the Midwest, I’d get them.”

“Can’t know until you try,” Jon says. He glances over Lovett’s shoulder, then retreats a half-step to flip through his own stack of magazines.

“This could be a whole—breakthrough moment in my bildungsroman,” Lovett says.

“Your bildungsroman,” Jon repeats.

Lovett doesn’t acknowledge him. “On the East and West Coasts, he just _can’t_ get it together, but—” Lovett brandishes a postcard featuring a picture of a paper mache cow in Jon’s direction—“maybe he plays in Peoria.”

“I think you have brain freeze,” Jon says.

“Not how it works,” Lovett says. “See? I’m smarter than you in the Midwest, too. I bet I’m like—like,  a nine in Minneapolis.”

“A what?”

“Like, a nine, like, a catch,” Lovett says. “Who’s hooking up in the Midwest? I’m young, I go to the gym.”

“You’re thirty-five,” Jon points out. “And you tweet at the gym.”

Lovett casts him a betrayed look. “So are _you_ ,” he says. “Where’s _your_ wedding ring?”

“What are you in LA?” Jon asks.

“Like—”

“On a scale from one to ten.”

“A curiosity,” Lovett tells him. He picks up a bust of a dog wearing an admiral’s uniform. “Do you think he looks kind of like Karl Rove?”

“Lovett—”

“If Karl Rove wore a monocle,” Lovett says, “which he _would_ have if he’d been born in the 1800s and lampooned in a Dickens serial. Which he _should_ have been.”

 _I think you’re cute. You’re cute. You’re hot, I think you’re hot, I wanna bite the back of your neck._ “You go on plenty of dates in LA,” he says finally.

Lovett tugs his beanie down more firmly over his curls. Then he turns the dog bust over to inspect the price sticker on its base. “Please,” he says, “none of us go on dates anymore.”

“Tommy does,” Jon says.

“Tommy has a long-term girlfriend _and_ he’s an incurable showboat _and_ he always has been. He was hired onto his first campaign at the age of, like, twelve.”

Lovett carries the dog with him as they wander back through the store. He makes Jon take a picture of him with a sign that reads ASSUMPTION, MN. After a while, dog tucked under his arm, flipping through a pile of old photographs, he says, “Guys ask me for your number all the time.”

“What?” Jon wishes he could identify Lovett’s tone, but it’s impossible. Lovett sounds disinterested—too disinterested to buy—but who knows what lies underneath?

“Yours and Tommy’s,” Lovett says. “When we go out together. Sometimes they think you two are, you know, and you might, you know—”

“I don’t know,” Jon says, and Lovett looks at him like, please. “You’ve never told me that,” he says instead of pushing the point.

“What,” Lovett says. He sounds kind of belligerent. “Did you want me to?”

“No,” Jon says.

“Fine,” Lovett says. Then: “I’m gonna get it.”

“My number?” Jon’s heart is pounding, but Lovett looks dismissive.

“Karl Rove,” he says, untucking the dog from under his arm and holding it up to his face. “The resemblance—uncanny.”

“You cannot leave that thing out in our room tonight,” Jon says. “I mean, you shouldn’t even—” but Lovett’s striding back towards the front of the store already. One of his lost-and-found gloves falls out of his pocket and onto the floor; he doesn’t notice. Jon picks it up with a sigh as he trails through his wake. “It stays in the wardrobe,” Jon says, “I _mean it_ , Lovett—”

The bell on the door dings, but when Jon looks over, there’s no one there—just the wind rattling at the glass, waving at Jon, as if to say, what are you doing, moron? What are you doing here, dummy?  

 

 

It keeps getting colder. “Well, _feeling_ colder,” Lovett says, “it can’t get _that_ cold and keep snowing,” but he’s shivering, squinting through the increasingly murky mid-afternoon as he tries to figure out where they are. Earlier, Jon had been keeping an eye on the cathedral to orient himself, but they’ve wandered far enough afield that he can’t find it anymore. “How far are we from the hotel?” Lovett asks, doing a full spin to peer back the way they came. The problem with the snow, which keeps falling, soft and steady, is that it’s disorienting—it makes every street feel like every other, and it’s hard to figure out how they ended up here, or where here even is.

“Bed and breakfast,” Jon says absently. When he pulls his phone out, wrestling a glove off to tap the screen, he finds it freezing to the touch and dead. “Hey, Mr. Robot, check your phone,” he tells Lovett.

“If that’s a taunt,” Lovett says, “I don’t care for it, and I won’t respond to it,” but he pulls his own phone out and squawks when its screen stays black and unresponsive no matter how many buttons he pushes. “Well, we’re fucked,” he says finally, giving up and shoving it back into his pocket. “You’re gonna have to orienteer us out of here.”

“With what wilderness skills?” Jon asks. He puts his own phone away, too. He feels uncharacteristically calm about being cut off from all his usual sources of information, communication, distraction. If he were alone, maybe he’d be—if not worried, at least uneasy. He doesn’t like being lost.

But he isn’t alone. Lovett’s here.

“Come on,” Lovett says, “you must’ve been—what—an Eagle Scout?”

“Nope,” Jon says.

“Come _on_ ,” Lovett says again. “You were. I can _see_ it.”

“What does that mean,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “In my mind’s eye! You in your little khaki uniform, sitting crisscross applesauce in front of the Scoutmaster, learning about civic responsibility and—urban survivalism—”

“How often do you think about this?”

“First time,” Lovett says, and then, “You _really_ can’t navigate using the stars?”

“It’s mid-afternoon and snowing,” Jon says. “There are no stars.”

“Just because you can’t see them,” Lovett says, “does _not_ mean they aren’t there. That’s called object permanence.”

“That’s called pedantry,” Jon corrects, and glances forward through the static of the thickening storm.

Lovett ignores him. “Well,” he says, “then I guess we’re gonna die, like in a Little House on the Prairie book, and we’ll never get to see the end of the world.” Then: “Actually: death by winter or death by nuclear winter? Pros and cons?”

“Or we could just ask for directions at the CVS,” Jon says, pointing to the lit windows at the corner up ahead.

“There were no CVSes on the prairie,” Lovett tells him, and shoves his hands under his armpits.

Inside the store, blinking a little at the onslaught of fluorescent light, Jon stomps up to the front counter to talk to the clerk, shaking the snow from his boots, while Lovett disappears down an aisle. He reemerges minutes later, as Jon’s squinting through a long story about the polar vortex and wondering how to redirect the conversation, with a box of Little Hotties, which he pitches onto the counter in front of Jon with a disgruntled sigh.

“Are these for me?” he says. Lovett rolls his eyes. His cheeks are red and damp. “Did you want a candy bar too?” Jon asks dryly, and can’t restrain a startled laugh when Lovett brightens and says, “Abso _lutely_ I do.”

Jon watches him for a moment as he stoops to inspect the display beneath the counter, then sighs and turns back to the clerk. “Do you think you could write those directions down?” he asks, and pulls out his wallet.

In the foyer of the CVS, Lovett shakes the box of hand warmers vigorously—“That’s not how they _work_ ,” Jon says, giggling anyway—and then, activating them correctly, puts one in each jacket pocket, hands two to Jon for his, and bends to stuff a packet into the side of each boot as well.

“You want?” he asks while he’s crouched, then says, “Whatever, if your feet get frostbite and fall off, _I’ll_ certainly never make it home,” and reaches out to tug at the tongue of Jon’s left boot. He seems to realize, after a second, that what’s happening is weird. “Full service,” he says. “God, I hope someone walks in on this—”

Jon chances a glance down at Lovett, and then, grateful for his three layers of outerwear, looks studiously up at the ceiling. There’s a stain on one of the tiles. He tries to decide what it looks like while Lovett pries at Jon’s bootlaces, probes at his ankles, worms warmth down against the side of his feet. Jon’s wearing thick wool socks, and the feeling of Lovett’s fingers is muted. It’s weird, he’s pretty sure, peering desperately at the stain (a giraffe?),  to think too much—maybe at all—about what it would feel like if his ankle were bare, and if Lovett’s slim fingers were touching it like something delicate, strange and good.

Walking is nicer with the warmers, and with some idea of where they’re going. “They shoulda had these things on Hoth,” Lovett says, burrowing his fists more deeply into his pockets. “Then maybe the hashtag resistance wouldn’t have gotten sued by space PETA.”

“I think I missed that part in the movies,” Jon says.

Lovett bumps into him a little as they trudge around a corner. “It’s called Wookieepedia, you normie.”

Jon had been—he can say it now—startled all those years ago when Lovett ended up working for him, when he’d pulled the curtain back from the best by far of the anonymous application essays he’d received and beheld who was shouting into the microphone behind it. He and Lovett had only previously met the once, via phone. Jon had been trying hard to sound remorseful without sounding like he was _just_ trying, rather than genuinely feeling, as he had been: he’d felt like shit.

“Oh, hey,” Lovett had said too easily in response to his first run at an apology, “no worries, it happens to the best of us.”

It’s not like Jon hadn’t been used to working with people who were mad at him for one thing or another. Lovett had been fine, a little thorny but fine, and easy to work with, even if you could hear his eyes rolling through the phone at times. He’d been sharp and quick, the kind of person who bullied the conversation into a shape he felt comfortable with, grabbing it now and then and yanking it wildly off-track before dumping it unceremoniously back onto the rails. Jon liked that kind of thing the way some people (Lovett) liked Sudoku: liked, even just for twenty minutes, trying to figure out how Lovett’s brain lurched from point A to point 3.

So maybe he’d been primed to like Lovett’s writing, too, both its problems and its promise. Maybe he’d been primed to like _Lovett_ , who’d seemed interesting right from the start, difficult to figure out, and who’d only gotten more interesting the longer Jon worked with him: oscillating wildly between self-congratulatory and self-effacing, making jokes and then looking suspicious when you laughed, loose and easy and locked-up and opaque all at once. Jon can still remember the first time Lovett smiled at him and didn’t spook after, the first time Lovett trailed him home from the bar like he belonged in Jon’s life, in Jon’s apartment, the first time Lovett said, “I put it on your tab,” and grinned like he knew he could get away with it.

Lovett is the most tiring person Jon knows, but somehow, Jon never gets tired of him. No matter how much he learns about Lovett, he always wants to know more. What Jon has with Lovett feels earned _and_ inevitable.

It’s the kind of thing he doesn’t like to think about losing.

 

 

All day, as they’ve wandered, there have been more signs of life than Jon might have expected: people snowshoeing, shoveling their walkways, power-walking briskly, holding steaming coffee cups in their bare hands. As dusk falls, though, the streets become somehow even busier with joggers and people out walking their dogs, who gambol gamely through heavy drifts of snow with little neon boots on their paws. Some of the dogs, Lovett points out, are bundled up in more protective gear than their owners, who keep sprinting healthfully past in spandex and sweatshirts, huffing loud, visible breaths as they disappear into the soft darkness of the near distance.

“Pundit would have a fit,” Jon says, watching a pale pitbull with a pink nose lope alongside its owner, orange-bootied feet flashing even as the rest of the animal blends almost into the busy air around it.

“ _Leo_ would have a fit,” Lovett says.

“I didn’t say he wouldn’t.”

“Don’t single my dog out,” Lovett says. Then, a little grudgingly, “You’re not wrong, though.”

Jon’s starting to see lights up ahead, dim through the gloom of the settling storm. “I guess Minnesota’s a no-go after all,” he says.

“I didn’t say that,” Lovett says.  

“Oh, so you and Pundit are gonna do _that_?” Jon says, pointing at the runner just as he turns the corner at the end of the street and disappears.

“Okay, first of all, I don’t even run in LA, so jot that down,” Lovett says.

“Jotted,” Jon says.

“And _second_ of all,” Lovett says, “Pundit could skijor me if she _had_ to.”

“She could what now,” Jon says.

“Pull me around on a—” Lovett’s gesturing, pumping his arms at his sides—“on my skis, on a lake. It was in the article.”

“The what?”

“I _read_ it to you,” Lovett says, “during dinner last night.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Jon tells him, which probably means he was ogling Lovett’s ear or something instead of paying attention.

“Just for that,” Lovett says, “I _am_ gonna move.”

“Ha ha,” Jon says.

“I could do it,” Lovett says.

“Oh, good luck,” Jon says, a little sharper than he means to.

“Catch me next winter in Minnesota,” Lovett says, dog with a bone.

“Mmm,” Jon says.

“Or Alaska,” Lovett says, which is—

“You’re not moving to Alaska,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “I _could_ ,” and Jon says, “but you _won’t_ ,” in a tone that, even to him, sounds about two times too insistent.

Lovett doesn’t seem to notice. He kicks out at a snowbank, watches as it explodes up into dust. “Come on,” he says, “don’t you ever think about moving?”

“No,” Jon says.

Lovett pauses. “Not, like, ever?”

“No,” Jon says again, and regrets immediately how defensive he sounds.

“Okayyyy,” Lovett says, casting him a sidelong glance. “Sorry I didn’t realize you were _so_ attached to, like, Cafe Gratitude and beating off in freeway traffic, or whatever.”

Jon feels like he’s on the precipice of—possibly losing his mind. _How could you ever think I’d leave you?_ he wants to say. _How could you ever consider leaving_ me? _What are you gonna do in_ Alaska? Who _are you gonna do in Alaska?_ “Why would you,” he says, and then, “I mean, I’m not,” and then, “we just rented an office, so—”

Lovett puts his hands up, like, _I give_. “Stay, then,” he says, “I don’t care.”

“Of course you _care_ ,” Jon says before he can help himself; but somehow it’s the right thing to say.

“Yeah,” Lovett says, “of course I do.” He readjusts his hat so that Jon can barely see his face.

“Why are you,” Jon says, and then, “do you really,” and then, “would you actually—”

“I don’t really think about it,” Lovett says, “very much. But don’t you ever just wanna run away?”

 _Not from you_ , Jon thinks, but keeps his mouth shut.

The thing is—it shouldn’t surprise him. He shouldn’t be surprised at all. If someone asked him to profile Lovett, “cut and run” would crack the top three character notes, easy. It might even come first on the cocktail napkin. Lovett is a political fighter and a personal flight risk; he’s ideologically bullheaded but emotionally gun shy, and he’s flown the coop before. It’s how he ended up in LA in the first place. Jon moved out to the West Coast for his own reasons, obviously, but he’s not an idiot, no matter what Josh Kraushaar thinks. He knows he was a little bit following Lovett, weighing correlation vs. causation on the why of his whole life seeming lackluster in the wake of Lovett’s leaving. _How happy did you make me_ , he’d thought, packing his Georgetown apartment into a Pod, booking a plane ticket, signing a month-to-month, sight unseen. _How badly do I need you?_

Really happy, it turned out. Really badly, it turned out, too. Conclusion: inarguably causation.

He’s stayed near Lovett ever since.

 

 

They’re halfway back to the B&B when Jon remembers that there’s no dinner to be had there and that, unlike Lovett, he didn’t cram two candy bars down the hatch an hour back.

“Why are you saying that as if I don’t _routinely_ have two actual dinners, like a literal hobbit?” Lovett says. “This is why I’m so bad at dating in LA, by the way. Whatever, obviously I wanna eat—”

It’s been actually dark for almost half an hour, and even through Jon’s gloves and thick socks, and even clutching the hand warmers and with his scarf wrapped around his face so that everything he says comes out thick and muffled, the cold keeps cutting sharply in. There’s a place with lights on across the street, anyway, so they duck in there.

The restaurant is half-full, maybe. It’s hardly crowded but still, in Jon’s opinion, busy for the weather. The hostess whisks them right back to a little booth in a far corner of the room, near the huge fireplace, occupied by a crackling fire, and with a good view of the bar. The whole place is low-lit, soft old music playing, and there’s a candle on their table that makes the interior stone walls seem soft and cozy.

It’s a nice place: kinda rustic upscale. It makes sense, then, that the first thing Lovett does after the hostess leaves is say, grimly, “I cannot wear these for one more minute,” and swing his right foot up onto the booth bench.

“You are _not_ ,” Jon says.

Lovett’s fingers are white and stiff-looking as he fumbles with the knotted laces of his boot. The yellow light of the candle flickers across his face; his nose and cheeks are red and his lashes are wet and dark, clumping together a little, strangely striking. Jon wants to reach out and take Lovett’s cold hands and hold them between his own, wants to fold his fingers around them and press and make warmth.

“You’re an animal,” he says, instead. “You can’t take your boots off in here.”

“I’m just loosening them,” Lovett says, finishing with one and squirming to swing the other leg up. Once both his feet are back on the ground, though, it’s painfully clear that he’s wedging them off.

“One of your ‘loose’ boots just hit me in the ankle,” Jon tells him, pointed, reviewing the wine list.

“Whoops,” Lovett says, cheerfully unapologetic. “Let’s get a bottle of red. No, let’s get two—”

“I think we could start with one,” Jon says, mostly because it’s his job to be the bridle more often than not, but Lovett says, “Treat me right,” in a bossy tone, and kicks his shin under the table, and Jon knows he’ll get what he wants, whatever he wants; Jon knows how easily he’ll give in.

 

 

In the end, they do drink two bottles of what Lovett calls an “excessively oaky” Pinot Noir, not that it stops him from downing four glasses alongside his steak.

“What would you know about it?”

“I know they serve red wine pretty warm already,” Lovett says, “so it’s good to drink when your hands are cold.”

Halfway through dinner, he sinks lower into his seat and props his besocked feet up on the bench beside Jon, who gives them a look and then ducks his head to hide an involuntary grin, which doesn’t even work—when he glances back up, Lovett’s biting his lip a little in that way that means, do you like it? Do you want more?

“Your feet smell,” he tells Lovett snidely.

“Like roses,” Lovett says, not even pretending to buy it.

It’s the kind of dinner they haven’t had time for recently—time _or_ inclination, maybe. The past few months have been nothing but worrying and planning and Lovett barging in to Jon’s house at half past nine in his glasses and his weird joggers to shout about some new horror he hadn’t considered, phone clutched in one small, sweaty hand. Jon isn’t really the kind of person who wishes he could unplug—or who’d even be good at it under any circumstances, let alone during the prolonged Defcon 1 they’re inhabiting these days—but it’s strange and almost unbearably nice to sit with Lovett for a long, uninterrupted while, laughing and joking, with no chance of an awful text or call or tweet breaking in on his good mood; nothing to distract himself with, nothing to look at but Lovett.

Of course, that’s its own problem. Lovett is rumpled and cozy-looking, damp hair curling and frizzing as it dries in the warmth of the restaurant, gesturing more and more with his hands as he gets warm, too, and as the wine starts to work. He makes Jon laugh so hard that he feels like everyone in the room must be looking at them, and then almost chokes on a piece of steak when Jon manages triumphantly to return the favor.

“Oh my god,” Lovett says, when, having hacked the offending bite up, he glances across the table to find Jon half-standing in alarm. “What were you gonna do?”

“The Heimlich!” Jon says.

“You’re tipsy and uncertified _,_ ” Lovett hisses. His eyes are bright from watering. “You could have broken me!”

“Broken is better than dead,” Jon tells him, and flags the waiter to order the second bottle of wine.

It’s just—nice. It’s nice. There’s nothing weird about saying that, or thinking it. Nice to have Lovett’s complete attention, to watch Lovett lean in seeking his in turn. Nice to listen to Lovett launch into a long rant about the problem with pre-dinner rolls, or why people shouldn’t use three-pronged forks. Nice to watch him pretend, three glasses deep, to somm the wine: swirling it in the glass, eyes crinkled, face flushed, and then taking a sip, rolling it in his mouth while emitting soft, performative mmms and ohhs that don’t sound any less lush or tempting for being jokes. _Nice._ There’s nothing wrong with feeling that.

When the bill comes, Lovett settles back in his side of the booth, hands crossed on his stomach. “Can we split it?” Jon asks the waitress, deadpan, and watches in unadulterated pleasure as Lovett startles and scowls and splutters until Jon cracks, and grins, and hands over his card.

“Leave a big tip,” Lovett tells him when it comes back. He’s half-ducked under the table and grunting as he wrestles his boots back on. “It’s bad to involve waiters in your mean jokes.”

“Mean?” Jon says.

“I deserve to be treated,” Lovett says. “Also,” ducking further so that Jon can’t see anything but his back, “the tip thing,” thumping his head against the table so that the glasses rattle, “because of my shoe situation—”

It’s nice, it’s nice, it’s nice—it’s just, Jon thinks, refusing to acknowledge the way his stomach flips, a really really nice night.

 

 

When they get back from dinner, the power’s out.

“I don’t understand,” Lovett says. “The what is what?”

“Sorry about him,” Jon tells her, dragging him apologetically back from the counter and taking his place. “It’s just—the what is what _?_ ” He glances around the lobby. If the receptionist hadn’t called out to them as they came in, he would have assumed this atmosphere was by design: the flickering candles casting Victorian shadows across the room, the darkened corners, the old-world wall sconces lighting the way upstairs.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. She _does_ look it, bundled up a thick wool cardigan and fingerless gloves, a book flipped to hold her spot on the counter before her, mouth twisted like, _what can you do_? The computer screen off to one side is black. It’s very quiet, Jon realizes suddenly; he can hear the wind starting to pick up outside. “It’s hard to say what the problem is—probably a downed line, and until it’s fixed, the heat’s out, too—”

“The _what_ is _what_?” Lovett yelps.

“—but the fireplace in your room is operational, and you’ll find extra comforters in the chest at the foot of your bed.”

“In the—okay, but when will the heat be back _on?_ ” Jon asks.

The receptionist shrugs. “It’s hard to say,” she tells him. “But the fire will keep things toasty up there, I promise. And we’ll send up a complimentary champagne breakfast in the morning, to apologize for the inconvenience.”

“What about a complimentary bottle of tequila right now,” Lovett says. Jon turns to glare him into submission, but gets stuck, instead, on the sight of Lovett, nose and cheeks pink, eyes bright, eyelashes wet with melted snow, mouth parted in indignation. Like so many of Lovett’s expressions, it isn’t—shouldn’t be—it’s not _attractive,_ per se, but it flips Jon’s stomach with brutal efficiency.

“Okay,” Jon says, turning back to the counter, “well. Thanks.”

“I really wish there were something else we could do,” the receptionist says. She’s pushed a little camp lamp across the counter; when Jon switches it on experimentally, the light is sharp and too white. He turns it off again as he picks it up.

“Not your fault,” he says, and turns to follow Lovett, who’s already sloping up the stairs, whole-body hissing. When Lovett’s annoyed, you can see it in the lines of his back, the set of his shoulders. At least, Jon can.

“I want,” Lovett says, stomping down the hall towards their room, “to be _warm_.”

“We’ll turn the fire on,” Jon says.

“No,” Lovett tells him, stopping at the door to their room and waiting, disgruntled and bedraggled, as Jon searches his pockets for the key, “ _you’ll_ turn the fire on.”

“What are you gonna do?” Jon asks.

“Hover over your shoulder and complain that you’re not doing it fast enough.”

“Can’t say you don’t know yourself,” Jon says, and lets them into the room.

The fireplace, it turns out, is easy to operate—just a switch on the wall beside the mantel, and a remote to control the flames. Jon fiddles with the settings by the light of the camp lamp while Lovett crosses to the far side of the room, shedding coat, scarf, and gloves as he goes, and absentmindedly plugs his phone into its charger. He stares at the stubbornly dark screen for a moment, and then, before Jon can say anything: “Shit, right.” He sets it down on the floor with a little laugh. “Welcome to the dark ages,” he says, and then, “On the bright side, maybe someone’ll launch the nukes while we’re unplugged and we won’t even have to know about it before we die.”

“Uplifting.” Jon makes himself turn his gaze back to the fireplace as Lovett starts to struggle out of his damp clothes, hissing and swearing the whole time. When he finally approaches the fire, dawning in Jon’s peripheral vision, he’s down to his boxer briefs, hugging himself and grimacing. He crouches on the hearth and puts his hands out to warm them.

“Make it hotter,” he says to Jon, who’s still examining the remote and definitely not sneaking glances at the bend of Lovett’s bare back, the breadth of his shoulders, the place where the waistband of his underwear cuts a little into the curve of his ass.

“It’s turned up as far as it’ll go.” Jon puts the remote on the mantel and kicks Lovett’s shin when he makes like he’s gonna get up and grab it for himself. “Just trust me,” he says, “you’ll be sweating in twenty minutes.”

“If I’m not,” Lovett says, “trust _me_ when I tell you I’ll sue.”

“This is why—”

“Don’t _even_ say it _,_ ” Lovett says. “Anyway, gays are still allowed to be overly-litigious, on account of _legitimate discrimination_.”

“Yeah,” Jon says, “that definitely seems applicable to this particular situation.” He clears his throat and bends to inspect the size of the blue flames in the firebox. His shoulder brushes up against Lovett’s as he shifts to peer further back into the space.

“Fuck,” Lovett says, flinching away from him. “Take your coat off already, idiot.” Then, before Jon can move, even to comply, he stands abruptly and says, “I’m gonna shower, I’m basically a blood slushie at this point.”

He doesn’t ask whether Jon needs the bathroom first; just barges in, kicking the door closed behind him.

“Gross,” Jon tells the fireplace, uselessly, and gets up to climb out of his own wet clothes.

Getting undressed doesn’t _have_ to be a complete production, he thinks, remembering the way Lovett had wriggled and hopped around one-footed and produced several suspicious crashing, crunching noises, after which he’d told Jon (who studiously refused to turn and look), “Don’t worry about it!” and, “Everything’s fine!” If Lovett were still out here listening—instead of twenty feet away and showering— _don’t think about elephants_ —he’d barely be able to tell Jon was doing _anything_ , Jon thinks self-righteously.

He peels his jeans and shirt off and opens the armoire, hangs them inside to dry; then, rolling his eyes at himself, he picks up all of Lovett’s clothes and hangs them as well. He drapes the gloves and scarves over the hooks of a polished wooden belt hanger and stands there for a minute staring vacantly into the wardrobe at Lovett’s bright red pants and henley and I-was-forced-to-purchase-this cashmere sweater, at his own dark-wash jeans and navy pullover—his own sensible cold-weather gloves and scarf, Lovett’s lost-and-found finds—thinking about how they all look there, together, mismatched but comfortable, familiar with each other. Then he shakes it off and goes to find a sweatshirt and pants to wear to bed.

When Lovett eventually emerges from the bathroom, Jon’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace flipping through—fucking Lovett— _Flowers in the Attic_. He glances up reflexively at the sound of the door opening, fingers going numb against the rough yellowed pages, as Lovett appears in a cloud of steam, full-body flushed and wearing nothing but a towel low on his waist. “I don’t,” he says, before Jon can even wrench his gaze right away, “wanna hear a _word_ about that tub,” which means he _did_ use the step stool, which means Jon’s laughing before he can worry any more about the way he’s pretty sure his eyes dilated when they slipped down Lovett’s chest to the trail of hair disappearing into his towel.

“Yeah, yuk it up,” Lovett says. He skirts Jon as he re-crosses the room; Jon can hear him padding around, opening the wardrobe, the suitcases, and probably, Jon thinks, leaving them like that. Fact: Lovett makes messes that he doesn’t clean up.

“Hey,” Lovett says, throwing himself down next to Jon on the floor and landing close enough that Jon’s arm prickles at the proximity. He’s wearing Jon’s t-shirt again, _no big deal_ , and makes a face when Jon, trying hard to seem unconcerned about the incursion, fumbles a page-turn and loses his place in his book. “Most people actually find it pretty easy not to forget about me while I’m literally in the room,” he says, leaning back on his hands, legs outstretched towards the fire.

 _Forget_ about him? “I bet,” Jon says. He puts the book down and raises his hand in a _talk talk_ gesture.

“Fuck off,” Lovett says. He’s wearing his glasses, and when Jon glances over he can see the flames reflected in his lenses. “You’re really red,” he adds after a minute.

“ _You’re_ really red,” Jon says, knee-jerk, and then says, “the fire,” just as Lovett, drawing his knees up to his chest with a dismissive little jerk of his head, says, “the shower—”

Lovett actually _is_ flushed, Jon realizes, and it probably _is_ a combination of the hot water and the wine and the raging fire, but that doesn’t make the mottled pink crawling down his cheeks and neck, disappearing into the stretched collar of Jon’s t-shirt, any less tempting.

“I’m gonna,” Jon says, clambering up and nodding at the bathroom, “before the hot water heater cools off.”

“Before it what now,” Lovett says. He’s craning his neck to look up at Jon.

“Don’t worry about it, bud,” Jon says, and makes a tactical retreat.

Jon’s never really understood the appeal of Clive Owen or Colin Farrell or whoever it is people who wanna do guys wanna do— _some_ of them must have names that don’t start with C—but Lovett makes him feel crazy, makes him feel hot and desperate and wholly transparent. He can’t shake the feeling that Lovett can see right through him: that he knows every single unspeakable thing Jon’s thinking about him, trying so hard not to, things he didn’t even know he _could_ think. If only—he tries to shut the thought down, fails—he’d reached out, snagged Lovett’s towel as he walked by, tugged him close; unknotted it, watched it fall, been right there, kneeling, ready to kiss Lovett’s thigh and hip bones and stomach, ready to press his lips to the tip of Lovett’s dick.

What if he did it?

What if he did it and didn’t like it?

What if he did it and _did_?

 

 

After Jon’s showered and put an extra two comforters on the bed—“If you do to these covers tonight,” he tells Lovett while shaking them out, “what you did _last_ night, I’ll keelhaul you—” he settles in with a book and pretends not to watch as Lovett, apparently untired by a whole day of activity, prowls around the room, poking through the wardrobe, fiddling (“Stop it—”) with the fire remote, speculating at some length, crouched in a corner of the room, about whether the house might have secret passages.

“Lovett,” Jon says sharply, and then bites his tongue before the words _come to bed_ can emerge into the crackling quiet of the room.

“I’m cooped up,” Lovett says. Fire or no fire, the room _is_ cold. Jon zones out for a moment, imagining that he can see goosebumps on Lovett’s forearms, on the backs of his bare thighs. Lovett _should_ just—get in the bed, there’s nothing weird about thinking that. They’re sharing the bed; the bed is warm; Lovett should climb into it. Jon doesn’t know why he won’t. Instead, he shifts course again and starts inspecting the desk. “I’m used to my space,” he says, and crouches inexplicably to peer at its underside, knocking sharply a few times in succession, so that, with the wind howling and the fire snapping, it sounds like there’s a ghost at the door. “I’m used to my _freedom_. I’m used to being able to go outside whenever I want to.”

“Oh, are you picky about that kind of thing?” Jon says. He hasn’t read a page of this dumb book in five full minutes. “I’ve never noticed that about you.”

“Funny,” Lovett says.

“You look like a freak,” Jon says, and makes himself rip his eyes away from the line of Lovett’s back as he stands again and starts to riffle through the drawers.

“No Bible,” Lovett says.

“Mmm,” Jon says. He flips the page.

“Gotcha,” Lovett says suddenly. Jon jerks his head back up at the sound of a drawer banging closed to see Lovett brandishing a thin, leather-bound book in one hand. “We have our own guestbook.”

“Joy,” Jon says dryly. But undaunted by his apparent disinterest, Lovett’s finally, _finally_ moving towards the bed, throwing himself next to Jon with a satisfied little ooph, wriggling a pillow under his chest, opening the book on the mattress before him.

“Very straight,” he says after flipping through a few pages. “We’re gonna be a zesty anomaly.”

“Mmm,” Jon says again. He rests his book against his chest and closes his eyes for a moment. He can feel his pulse picking up; he wishes he knew how to regulate it, this want, this what-do-I-want?

“And to think,” Lovett says. Jon can hear him flipping pages. “All these people fucked right here in this very bed.”

“Jesus!” Jon says, eyes flying open.

“A _ha_ ,” Lovett says, “ _that_ got your attention! Pervert,” he adds, looking infuriatingly sanctimonious for someone who just said—

“I don’t want,” Jon says, “to think about who else has fucked in this bed.”

“Who _else_ —”

“Who period,” Jon says, “you know what I meant.”

Lovett hums and wriggles a little, then ignores it. “Thousands of people, probably,” he says, tipping his head to one side as if actually attempting to estimate. “Tens of thousands. How old do you think this thing is—Victorian?”

“You’re sick,” Jon says. Then, grudgingly, considering it: “Could be Colonial.”

“ _Tens of thousands_ ,” Lovett repeats with relish. He turns his gaze back to the guest book and idly flips a page. Jon’s pretty sure the math doesn’t check out (whatever, it’s only Lovett’s oft-asserted area of expertise), but—“Just think—”

“Please don’t make me—”

“—what these people could’ve been into. ‘Miriam and Dennis Marchand, one of the loveliest weekends we’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying.’” Lovett scrunches up his nose. He’s crossing and recrossing his legs in the air, kicking them gently, like a thirteen-year-old at a slumber party. “Rope stuff?” he ventures finally.

“Who comes to a B&B equipped to do ‘rope stuff?’” Jon says.

“Someone who knows they booked the room with the four poster,” Lovett says. “Duh. ‘Pat and Anders Karlsson, enchanting weekend, we’ve never felt more relaxed!’ Probably furries.”

“Based on what,” Jon says, smiling despite himself.

“Intuition,” Lovett tells him loftily. “And experience,” he adds under his breath.

“Ignoring,” Jon says. Lovett flashes him a thumbs up.

Jon closes his eyes again. The sound of the fire is soothing, and the bed feels close and cozy now that Lovett’s crawled into it. Lovett’s rustling a little, still flipping through the book. “Hey,” he says after a few minutes, “remember that time we got snowed in back in DC?”

“I’m tired,” Jon says without opening his eyes, “not brain dead.”

“Well, excuse me,” Lovett says. “You spent most of the weekend high out of your mind, so _I_ don’t know.”

Jon does crack an eye at this. “I got that DNC speech done first,” he says.

“The statute of limitations on feeling smug about that is _way_ up, bud,” Lovett tells him.

“Mmm,” Jon says noncommittally. Then: “That was a fun weekend.”

“The presidential motorcade almost skidded into a ravine,” Lovett says.

“Exaggeration,” Jon says, “and anyway, it didn’t.”

“And a tree branch fell onto a car full of reporters,” Lovett adds.

“Like I said,” Jon tells him drowsily, “fun.”

“Hey,” Lovett says. “We _are_ the media now, mister, see if you can muster a little sympathy for your fellow defenders of democracy.”

“We made you cook so many eggs,” Jon says instead, and cracks a grin when Lovett groans and thunks his head back against the headboard.

“Why couldn’t Tommy have stocked up on Kraft like every other fratty fuckwad inside the Beltway?”

That blizzard had hit just a month or so after he and Rashida broke up. The breakup wasn’t the end of the world, not by far, but it had left him at loose ends, itchy and restless in some of DC’s dreariest months. He and Lovett had both gone into work that Friday morning—almost the only people in the West Wing—and ironed out the final elements of the speech in question, lined up some additional remarks for the next few days, then capitulated to the insistent dire warnings of weather.com and ventured back outside to find a world even less traversable than they’d imagined. Tommy and Lovett’s place was closer than Jon’s, and even then, it had taken them hours to slog all the way there, the Metro stopped in places (“It’s underground, what the fuck kind of delays are affecting it?”) and snow falling heavily on the walk, their feet wet and freezing.

By the time they made it in the door (“Just chill here, dude, there’s no way you’re making it back to your place tonight,”) Tommy had already eaten an eighth of a weed brownie and was zoned out on the couch in a don’t-worry-about-it daze. They’d peeled out of their wet clothes and Jon had eaten a corner of the brownie, too, and Lovett said, “Pass,” for no reason that Jon could tell except that he was feeling ornery—in one of those moods he had sometimes—still does—when he doesn’t wanna do what other people are doing just _because_ they’re doing it. Jon hadn’t cared. He sat on a pillow on the groaning radiator for what felt like hours, watching the snow fall thick and fast, piling up on the fire escape and in the road outside where each street lamp shone like a little moon on the drifts that rose and rose and shifted beneath the wind and became hills, and mountains, mountains that Jon thought about climbing.

Eventually, he and Tommy had both said they were hungry and Tommy had said, “Let’s order pizza,” and Lovett had said, “Oh my _God_ ,” and gone to look in the fridge, where all he’d found—there had been a long interrogation about this the next day, with no reasonable explanation ever provided—were two dozen eggs and a cabbage. When he emerged from the kitchen, holding a carton in each hand, an incredulous look on his face, Tommy giggled. Jon took one of the boxes from him and said, “Be careful,” low and admonishing, “these are supposed to be _babies._ But they never will be,” sadly, opening the box and petting the dome of each egg in turn. “They’re, like, so delicate,” he had said, taking Lovett’s hand and drawing it down to one of the shells, like, see? “It’s like—should I even be _touching_ these?”

“No,” Lovett said flatly, taking the carton back.

“You _have_ to cook them,” Tommy had said plaintively, and Lovett said, “Oh, I’m sorry, _now_ I’m allowed to touch the stove?” and Tommy said, “ _Please_ ,” and Jon said, “ _Please,_ ” already forgetting what they were asking for, but he _liked_ asking Lovett for things, especially when Lovett looked cranky, and he _did_ look cranky, but he said, “ _Don’t_ say any more weird pro-life-y shit,” and hard-boiled every single one of them, then cracked into the liquor cabinet and drank almost half a handle of some whiskey that Tommy’s girlfriend at the time had given him as an anniversary present (“ _Not sorry_ ,” he’d hissed the next day, clutching his head and grimacing). They ate practically all the eggs before the storm was over: some chopped and mixed with mayonnaise and smeared on Triscuits, the next day, when they were all sick and slow-moving.

And the thing is—

The thing _is_ , Jon hadn’t _once_ wanted to kiss the snowflakes off of Lovett’s eyelashes while they were trudging home through the storm. Hadn’t wanted to open his coat and hold out one arm and fold Lovett in beneath it, rest his cheek on the top of Lovett’s head. Not even later, when he was so high he almost let Lovett goad him into running around the block naked. (“No one will know it’s you—!”) Not even when Lovett finally got drunk and giggly and said the apartment was too hot, which it was (those centrally controlled radiators had been hell, and when they tried to open the windows, the snow flew in so fast they had to close them again immediately) and wrestled his sweatshirt off and lay on the floor of the living room, bare-chested, holding his phone above his face and reading aloud the word for _snow_ in every language. Not that night, and not the next morning, when he woke on the couch to find Lovett wedged uncomfortably into an armchair, snoring, instead of in his own bed; his little toes curled over the edge of the cushion, bare and white.

Not once, the whole weekend. He hadn’t _once_ felt like the snow was making him wild, making Lovett irresistible.

Not that— _be fucking_ honest _with yourself_ —he thought it was the snow this time around, either.

“It was a fun weekend,” Jon says again.

Lovett’s looking at him, faintly puzzled. “Where the hell did you go?” he asks.

Jon shrugs. “What about these guys,” he says, shifting onto his side and reaching to tap an entry in the guestbook at random. Lovett shrugs, too, and leans in to read it.

“‘Margot and Jeremy Brendell: best pancakes we’ve _ever_ had!’ I don’t know,” he says, “some kinda syrup situation?”

“Your heart wasn’t in that one,” Jon says. “Try again.”

“Sure,” Lovett says, “criticize me from your high tower of contributing nothing.”

“Hey, who am I to mess with a winning formula?”

Lovett puts his face down on the guestbook. “You’re gonna be sorry,” he says, slightly muffled, face contorting as he talks, “when this big fish ceases to share his spotlight with you, peon.” Now that he’s finally stilled and dropped his feet to rest on the bed, it’s harder to ignore the slope of his back, his ass, the sturdy line of his legs.

“What happens when you mix your metaphors?” Jon asks, gentler than he means to.

Lovett groans. “Oh my God,” he says. “Please don’t remind me about the horrible things you used to do to my copy.”

“It was for your own good,” Jon says. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well—”

“I don’t know,” Lovett says. “I’m _cold_.”

“Yeah,” Jon says. He tugs at the pile of comforters Lovett’s pinning down until Lovett grunts and shifts enough for him to yank them free. Then he tosses them over Lovett so that they’re burrowed under the weight and the warmth together. “Better?”

“Yeah.” Lovett’s still lying on the book. “Margot and Jeremy Whatsits,” he says after a moment. “I don’t know. Probably did it standard style.”

“Standard—”

“You know.” Lovett squints one eye open. “Normal. Normal standard.”

“What constitutes…?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Lovett says, “but you’ve had, like, a lot of sex in your life, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, Lovett,” Jon says, startling himself with the huskiness of his own voice. He clears his throat. “I’ve had sex.”

“Great,” Lovett says. “Extrapolate from your varied experiences, then.”

“I’m asking what you,” Jon says—fuck, he shouldn’t _push_ this—“I mean—what you’re calling—I’m asking you, though.”

Lovett doesn’t say anything. Jon can feel the back of his neck flushing. He shouldn’t have kept— _saying_ things, he’s not sure why he did, except that—the wine, and the way they’re nestled in together, away from everything and everyone—and except that he wants to _know_.

Lovett doesn’t talk about sex.

Maybe that’s too absolute a statement. Lovett jokes about cute guys; he sniggers at double entendres; he says suggestive things in a variety of lascivious tones, waggles his eyebrows, smirks, sing-songs, exaggeratedly sizes dudes up; he leans, he leers, he loves making people (read: Jon and Tommy) flush and say, _“Lovett!”_ or even just, “O _kay_ , moving _on_ —”

Lovett _loves_ to talk about sex abstractly, or in ways designed to make other people squirm and wince. What he doesn’t do is talk about the kind of sex people actually have—the kind of sex _he_ actually has.

“I don’t know, Jon,” Lovett says, finally. His eyes are closed, face unreadable. “Standard style like—they really loved each other, enough that it seemed like a good idea to spend a whole weekend cooped up together in the kind of city where it matters if the heat goes out. Probably face-to-face, holding hands, saying so.”  

It’s not a full image—just a flicker—but Jon feels it in his fingers, in his stomach. It’s such a potent suggestion—so insistent with possibility—that he’s saying, “Lovett,” all twisted up about it, before he knows what’s happening—

But Lovett’s struggling up so that he’s half-crouched under the heavy comforters, closing the guestbook with a page-rustling thump. “Okay,” he says, “enough repulsive happy heterosexual imagines for one night.”

“I was listening to that,” Jon says, heart still pounding, reaching over to knock on the leather cover of the book.

“Whatever,” Lovett says brusquely. “If you like the genre, merely cast your mind back to your own escapades.”

“Hey,” Jon says. But Lovett’s waving a hand, shoving the guestbook onto his nightstand, turning over in a huge flurry of yanking and grunting and kicking until he’s settled on his back, pillows in disarray beneath him.

“Come on,” he says, in a tone that Jon knows from experience won’t be reasoned with. “I’m sure you’ve fucked a woman face-to-face before. If you liked hearing about it, you’ll _love_ thinking about it. Enjoy.” Then, after a fierce moment of silence: “Now I don’t have anything to read. I’m not getting out of this bed again. I don’t have anything to _read_.”

“Here,” Jon says. He hands Lovett _Flowers in the Attic_. When Lovett grimaces, Jon just says, “You chose it,” and, “you can read it to me.”

“Oh, can I?” Lovett says.

“Go ahead,” Jon tells him, and puts a hand under his cheek on the pillow while he waits for Lovett to give in.

The thing about hanging out with Lovett… well. One thing. It warps time in a way Jon can’t explain. Even back in DC, he’d drop by Lovett’s place for a minute to drop off some papers or his lost wallet, or meet him out for just one beer—and find himself, three, four, five hours later, in the same place and as many drinks deep, discussing—oh—anything.

Right now, tucked in and listening to Lovett read, interrupting himself at frequent intervals to provide color commentary, it’s happening the way it always does: time slowing and strange-ing alongside Lovett’s speech. There’s no clock, now, no way of telling how time’s passing. Jon feels like he’s in a snowglobe, storm raging outside, tucked in beneath three quilts with Lovett’s voice washing over him.

It’s easy to pretend against reality without phones or TV. Of course, without those distractions it’s _less_ easy to pretend against the fact that what he feels about Lovett isn’t flash-in-the-pan. It’s steady, like the heat of the fire radiating out from the heart of the room. It’s the hearth.

After a while, Lovett stops reading aloud. When Jon glances over, he’s passed out, book clenched against his chest. Jon pries it out of his hands, then gets out of the bed, sets it on the nightstand, and crosses to peer indecisively at the fireplace, trying to remember something he read once about carbon monoxide poisoning.

Eventually, he palms the remote and brings it back to the bed. In the minute he’s been gone, Lovett has turned onto his stomach and kicked his legs over onto Jon’s side, so that he’s covering an improbable swathe of bed given his size. Jon withholds a sigh, and climbs gingerly back in, nudging Lovett to one side—then, when this fails to have any effect, he bodily lifts Lovett’s limbs, trying to reposition him onto one side of the mattress. He’s relocating Lovett’s arm when Lovett startles a little. He doesn’t quite seem to wake, but his fingers flex. He grabs at Jon’s hand, draws it up to his face.

“Lovett,” Jon says helplessly, but low, and doesn’t—fuck—doesn’t pull his hand back when Lovett turns his cheek into it, lips brushing, just barely, the tips of his fingers. He lets them rest for a moment on Lovett’s face. Then he says, “Shh,” and extracts himself; turns his bedside lamp off; rolls over so his back’s to Lovett. He pulls the comforter up over his shoulders and tries to pretend he’s alone in the room. He sleeps.

 

 

Jon swims up out of a dream in which he, Tommy, and Lovett are canoeing in a wing of the White House to the sound of someone chewing in the bed next to him. He’s lying on his stomach, arms wrapped around his pillow. He grunts and tips his head towards the sound, squinting his eyes open. Above him, Lovett is sitting back against the headboard, a plate resting precariously on his thigh, reading an actual honest-to-god pulp-and-ink paper that he’s folded at odd angles in order to hold one-handed.

“Mmmph,” Jon says. Lovett startles a little, glancing away from the paper, still chewing.

“It lives,” he says.

“‘It,’” Jon says, grimacing. He stretches. “Whatsit,” he says, trying to incline his head at the plate. He feels soft and lazy.

Lovett spears something on his fork. “You’re so dumb in the morning,” he says, and a second later Jon’s protesting around a mouthful of eggs, some of which spill out—what did Lovett expect?—onto the bedspread.

“Well that was gross,” Lovett tells him while Jon tries to remember, still sleep-zonked, how chewing works.

“... _you’re_ gross,” Jon says. More egg on the bedspread. He swallows as best he can and scrubs his mouth off with his hand, then struggles into a sitting position and tries to blink the scene clear.

There’s a cart at the end of the bed covered in plates, pitchers, an ice bucket with the promised bottle of champagne.

“Power?” Jon asks.

Lovett shakes his head.

“Plane?”

Lovett shakes his head again. He puts the newspaper down on his knee and crams a piece of toast into his mouth before speaking, which—whatever. “Still grounded,” he says. “We pretty much live in Minnesota now. I’m resigned to it. I’m sanguine. I feel really chill about the whole thing.”

Jon looks around a little more, dimly. “Coffee?” he says, finally.

“I wish more people knew,” Lovett says, picking up his plate and shoving it at Jon, who barely gets a grip on it before Lovett’s swinging out of bed and racketing around down by the breakfast cart, “how fan _tastically_ dumb you are when you wake up. I _know_ this is why you go running first thing, by the way—so no one ever gets to experience all of—this—”

Jon squints. “I live alone,” he says.

“Whatever,” Lovett says, and comes back to the head of the bed with a cup of coffee in hand, which he exchanges for his plate. “I’m gonna film you one of these days,” he says, “and then the world will understand.”

The coffee is sweet and hot, and the bed is warm and soft, and Lovett subsides after a moment and goes back to reading the paper, mostly silent, turning every now and then to brandish it in Jon’s direction and explain his passions before flipping a page. Jon holds his mug in both hands and drinks slowly, staring intermittently out the window and, tilting his head a little, over at Lovett, who seems not to notice. “ _You’re_ dumb in the mornings,” he says after about ten minutes have passed, when his brain’s come mostly online.

“No,” Lovett says, eyes still fixed on the paper, “I’m _cranky_ in the mornings. It’s a whole different thing,” and Jon isn’t quite up enough to argue the point, which maybe proves it, anyway.

Neither of them wants to go outside again (“I’ve had my fun, I’ve kept my limbs, I’ll stay put and wait for death to seek _me_ , now, thanks—”). It’s storming worse today than it had been the day before. Jon lies in bed until his body physically rebels, then gets up and spends an hour sitting at the desk trying to work, until his iPad hits 20% and he stops on the general principle that there oughta be some way for people to contact them if the power stays off.

After Lovett finishes reading the paper cover to cover, the two of them waste the rest of the morning, more or less, arguing over the crossword puzzle while eating second-breakfast egg-and-sausage sandwiches. Lovett is objectively worse than Jon at crosswords in that the answers he produces are rarely right; but he has, as he puts it, “the strength of his convictions,” and keeps grinding the proceedings to a halt to argue for his answers, relitigating half the (neat and, Jon thinks, fondly frustrated, _accurate_ ) puzzle to try and make them fit. Sometimes he makes enough of a case that Jon feels obligated to give him the win, which means that their completed puzzle is a Frankenstein’s monster its author would probably shudder to behold.

“Memo to Will Shortz,” Lovett says, self-satisfied, flinging the paper onto the floor, “I could do your job with my hands tied behind my back.”

“And to think that you run around accusing other people of being into rope stuff,” Jon says, and feels it like a slug of whiskey when Lovett barks a surprised laugh.

“I never said I _wasn’t_ ,” he tells Jon, winking. Jokes, jokes, jokes, Jon thinks glumly, and tries not to think about Lovett, just a few months ago, red-cheeked and laughing on Jon’s couch, both dogs scrambling for space on his lap, all three of them tangled up in string lights.

In Jon’s opinion, Lovett had been inching into the realm of melodramatics the night before, acting like the room was a prison cell, acting like staying indoors together for an hour or so was such a chore.

Today, though, Jon’s starting to catch that same strand of melodrama.

When he saw this room for the first time, he remembers thinking it seemed nice, spacious.  Now it seems small. It had been one thing to spend a whole day with Lovett, and _only_ with Lovett, in the wideness of the outdoors. It’s another thing entirely to do the same inside, where the air is starting to tremble with closeness, where there’s nothing to listen to but the sound of Lovett breathing and shifting in front of the fire as he reads. Jon has the feeling, as he paces a little, that they’re crammed so tightly together in here that every time Lovett moves, he can feel it like an elbow to the solar plexus, a thoughtless foot kicking into his shin; and that if _he_ moves too much, Lovett will start saying, “ _Ouch_ ,” and, “Watch it!” without knowing why.

Jon’s starting to understand the joggers he and Lovett had looked askance at the day before. He can’t see anything out the window except the thick, relentless storm, but even that deluge seems preferable to the feeling that all the air’s going out of this room: that he and Lovett are gonna end up giving each other mouth-to-mouth just to survive.

 _Stop. Stop. Stop_ , Jon thinks wildly, and clears the suitcases out from in front of the wardrobe so that he has a flat, empty space in which to do push-ups.

The push-ups feel good for a minute. What he wants, what he desperately wants, is to clear his head; for his arms and abs to be aching so badly that he couldn’t think if he wanted to. Instead, around number forty-three, he hears Lovett scrambling up from the floor by the fire to say, “What is your _damage_?”

“Ignore me,” Jon grunts tightly. _Forty-four. Forty-five._

“Ig _nore_ —oh, ig _nore_ you,” Lovett says. Jon can see him moving in his peripheral vision. _Forty-six. Forty-seven._

It shouldn’t matter that Lovett’s watching. It shouldn’t. But Jon can feel himself pushing harder, panting and straining, hot under the idea of Lovett’s eyes on him.

“Show-off,” Lovett says. His voice sounds distant and strange through the rushing in Jon’s ears, _forty-eight, forty-nine_ —“You know—” _fifty_ —“just because we can’t access pay-per-view right now, it doesn’t mean there’s a hole in the market.”

Jon does three more push-ups without responding, thinking about Lovett putting his feet up on Jon’s back while he works out, using Jon as a coffee table, and then goes down and stays down, lowering himself onto his stomach and letting the weight off his arms. He turns his head uncomfortably to look up at Lovett, who’s flushed from the fire, staring down at him, book clutched in one hand.

Jon says, “I’m just feeling kinda.”

“Oh, okay,” Lovett says. He sounds weirdly shrill. “When _I’m_ feeling ‘kinda,’ it’s all, ‘Calm down, Lovett. Go to sleep, Lovett.’ But when _you’re_ feeling ‘kinda—’”

“You really don’t have to do the air quotes—”

“Suddenly the room is a gym!”

“...Calm down, Lovett,” Jon says, rolls onto his back, and starts doing crunches. From this position he can see Lovett’s face doing—something. Whatever. At least when he’s purposefully annoying Lovett, he’s not thinking about doing anything _else_ with Lovett, except that now he definitely is. _One, two, three—_

“I’m going downstairs,” Lovett says, “I’m going to read my book _downstairs_ , in peace and quiet.” He keeps standing there for a moment, still staring at Jon, like he wants a reaction—then, in a flurry of startled motion, he spins on his heel and stomps off.

He’s back fifteen minutes later. “Did you know,” he says, bursting into the room and bolting the door shut behind him, “that when you go down there, people try and talk to you? Oh, hey, calisthenics hour is over, thank God.”

“Oh, but you love small talk,” Jon says, glancing up from _The Fountainhead_.

“Ha. Ha.” Lovett crosses the room and settles into one of the armchairs (legs crossed, then legs uncrossed, one leg up, one leg outstretched, both legs up, butterflying). “Don’t bother me,” he says, opening his book with a sharp, prim little gesture of dismissal. “I’m reading.”

It’s quiet for a while. Jon tries to focus on Ayn, which is mostly an exercise in staring off into the middle distance, contemplating the nature of various political ideologies. He drinks some more cold coffee. The tenseness of midday has worn off a little and the quiet is dense but not oppressive.

“Just think,” he tells Lovett after one long break from _The Fountainhead_ , “if you’d booked us into a Marriott, we could be watching _Law and Order_ right now.”

Lovett doesn’t look up from _Flowers in the Attic._ He flips a page with a dry crackle. “I’m not engaging with you,” he says. “I’m reading.”

It would help, Jon thinks, if Lovett could just… be a little less, although he’s not sure exactly _how_ —what Lovett could offload that might keep Jon from feeling so helpless in the face of him.

“Do I have something in my teeth?” Lovett’s voice is startling, and when Jon shakes himself he finds that Lovett is scrutinizing him. Jon had just been—staring, he realizes, ears getting hot.

“You make these faces,” Jon says.

“I do not,” Lovett retorts contrarily, but it seems to assuage him. He dog-ears his page and flips the book shut, tossing it onto the armchair behind him, then stands and crosses to the window, leaning close enough to the glass as he peers outside that Jon can see fog blooming and shrinking as he breathes. “I can’t believe we’re gonna get literally buried alive in the least memorable state in America,” he says, rapping his fingers against a pane and turning away again. He paces back to stand in front of the fire. He looks, uncharacteristically, restless but actively trying to contain it. Lovett almost never tries to contain anything, least of all himself.

“Hey,” Jon says. He hasn’t thought any further ahead—hasn’t thought beyond the impulse to distract Lovett when he seems to need distracting—and when Lovett turns away from the flames, Jon finds himself momentarily at a loss for words. “Wanna play cards?” he says finally.

 

 

They’re halfway through their fourth round of dueling solitaire and all the way through their bottle of champagne when the power blinks back on.

“Hey!” Lovett says, throwing an arm out to gesture at the room at large, which has come suddenly to life: the bedside lamp and the bathroom light flickering on in tandem; Lovett’s phone, still plugged in across the room, suddenly flashing a charging signal.

“I can see your cards,” Jon says.

Lovett yanks them back towards his chest. “Cheater.”

“Careful in your glass house,” Jon tells him. Lovett spent the first two rounds of the game brazenly shoving cards up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, until Jon ordered him to strip down to his t-shirt, trying not to look too shamefully wanting when his collarbones, his pale arms and wrists, were revealed again.

“Everybody hates a winner,” Lovett says. He takes his cards with him and crosses to crouch by his phone while it reboots. Jon drains the last drop from his champagne flute, then takes his cue to go plug his own phone in. He’s barely watched it flicker to life, though, before Lovett’s throwing his down again and saying, “Hey, we’re not finished with the game.”

On the one hand, Jon thinks, dropping his own phone and rejoining Lovett on the floor, there’s something safe about being part of the world again. On the other hand, he thought he’d feel saf _er_ than this. All the strange tension of being cooped up with Lovett, just the two of them, tripping over each other in the small space of the room—it’s still there. It doesn’t drain away just because their phones are flashing message after message after notification after notification, just because they _can_ reach out if they want to, which Jon doesn’t—well—he wants to check Twitter, he does—but he also wants to—

“Hi, hello, it’s your turn,” Lovett says, snapping his fingers in front of Jon’s face. His knees are drawn up to his chest. He looks small and solid and familiar and happy.

Jon _likes_ making Lovett happy. He feels like a fucking caveman about it. _Me make Lovett smile. Me make Lovett laugh._ Jesus Christ. “Okay,” he says instead, “prepare to get destroyed.”

The afternoon light is muted and shifting, and gone completely before long. They keep playing, then stop while Lovett tries to build a house of cards, then play another round, only calling the increasingly heated competition off when Lovett’s stomach starts to audibly growl.  

“If the Pizza Hut website _says_ they’re open for delivery,” Lovett says, lying on the floor holding his phone above his face, tipping his head back to look at Jon, “but I can, like, look out the window and see what the weather’s like, is it unethical to make ‘em do it anyway?”

“As you’re constantly reminding me,” Jon says, “it’s their job.”

“ _Thank_ you _,_ ” Lovett says, and orders an extra-large stuffed crust everything, which of course he refuses, when his phone dings an hour and a half later, to go downstairs and pick up. Jon has to do it instead, smiling apologetically at the heavily bundled driver and tipping him a guilty $20.

“My hero,” Lovett says when Jon comes back into the room, face still cold and damp from the snow that blew in while he was standing at the door.

 _Me make Lovett happy_ , Jon thinks; hands over the box and refuses to think about it anymore.

 

 

“I’m concerned,” Lovett says, later that night, after they’ve climbed into bed and settled back with their phones, “that the other guests are gonna think we’re not having a good time.”

“What?” Jon glances up from what’s proving to be a hopeless Twitter backread. He was offline for a day and a half but the sheer volume of news is making catch-up a Sisyphean task.

Lovett’s looking restless again, running a finger along the cover of the guest book which is still sitting next to the bed. “St. Paul, Minnesota,” he says, driving his heels into the mattress. “Midnight. A B&B in which rooms are booked to rekindle the smoldering embers of romance long-since burned low. Outside, winter winds wail. Cut to an eerily quiet bedroom,” Lovett intones. “A young, apparently healthy couple lies in silence on the bed that so many have copulated in over the centuries. Throughout the mansion, middle-aged marrieds, their best fuckyears behind them, listen with bated breath for the carrying sounds of young, carnal pleasure, but _none_ are forthcoming. What’s _wrong_ with these guys? Do their dicks not work? Wherefore won’t they endeavor to perform eroticism for the enjoyment of others?”

“I worry that Crooked Media is stifling the scope of your creative imagination,” Jon says finally, after rejecting about nineteen other options.

Lovett frowns and tips his head back on the pillow to stare at the headboard and the wall behind them.  “I’m _serious_ ,” he says, in that tone of voice that means he’s anything but. “People are gonna think our relationship’s in trouble.”

Jon flexes his fingers against the cold, soft sheets. “We don’t have a relationship,” he says evenly.

“That’s never stopped anyone else from bending over backwards to keep up appearances,” Lovett says. “I don’t want everyone at breakfast thinking I’m, like, impotent.”

“You can tell them I’m the impotent one,” Jon says. “Okay? Can you just—” but Lovett’s already talking again, making a face, saying, “Even worse. I should pound the wall and shriek for a couple minutes. Then at least they’ll only think we lack stamina.”

“No?” Jon says.

“You can jump on the bed if you wanna help out,” Lovett says. “If we broke the frame, that would _really_ prove we’re having fun.” He makes as if to get up and Jon whacks an arm unthinkingly out across his chest, pinning him back to the mattress. “Hey!” Lovett says. He struggles a little against the restriction. “I wasn’t really gonna!”

“And yet,” Jon says, “I’m still holding you down for a couple minutes until this idea vacates your brain.” His heart, he realizes, is pounding; he can feel his dick stirring even as he shifts to lean a little more weight onto Lovett’s chest, which isn’t his fault, it’s not _his_ fault that Lovett’s lying here next to him talking about loud virile fucking, saying he wants everyone to know that Jon’s dick is fully operational—

What he should do, he knows, is take his arm back.

That would be a smart move. It really would.

He could laugh and let up, pull back onto his own side of the bed, say something stern and too-fond, like, “No making a scene,” or, “Tommy said _low profile_ , remember? I’ll tell on you.”

But he can’t—somehow he can’t seem to make himself move. Lovett’s breathing heavily, saying, “Wow, big strong man, _look at me, I do push-ups, I get off on impeding my friend’s autonomy,_ ” but Jon’s not ( _get off on_ ) listening _that_ hard. Instead, he’s thinking about the way Lovett’s chest feels, rising and falling under his forearm, somehow broad and compact at once. “Come _on_ ,” Lovett says. “I’ll be good. I can be good.”

“Believe it when I see it,” Jon says, aiming for casual. He misses by a mile.

“I _can._ ” Lovett doesn’t even seem to have noticed. He’s wriggling under Jon’s arm, trying to escape, shifting so that Jon, who’s leaning hard on him, falls sideways a little, has to scrabble around onto his knees to keep holding him down. “This is un _reasonable_.” He falls back onto his elbows after struggling for a minute and tips his chin up. Somehow, Jon’s ended up practically braced over him. “Is this what you and Tommy do when I’m out of the office?” Lovett asks. “Is that it? You can’t go two days without a bout of high-spirited homosocial grappling?”

“Tommy actually almost never threatens to embarrass me,” Jon says.

Lovett has stilled. “Tommy’s boring,” he says.

“Oh?”

“Tommy’s boring and he gets rewarded for it and I’m interesting and I get oppressed because of it,” Lovett says. Then he narrows his eyes and says, “Fine, you wanna,” and doesn’t even finish his thought before his hand is darting up and he’s—

“Seriously?” Jon chokes out, the accusation tilted with disbelief, ragged with reflexive laughter, because Lovett’s digging his fingers into Jon’s side, actually and genuinely tickling him.

“Serves you right,” Lovett says smugly. He uses Jon’s shock as leverage to push his arm off, struggling up to his knees and half-turning as if, after all this, he really _is_ gonna start hammering on the wall.

“Nope,” Jon says, and lunges for him.

“Jesus,” Lovett says with a grunt of surprise as Jon grabs him from behind. He smacks an arm back as Jon half pins him, thrashing and laughing, to the bed. Jon’s used to this kind of roughhousing—his whole life, he and his friends have joked around like this. There’s something almost relieving, for a moment, about how normal it feels, how familiar—maybe it _can_ be easy with Lovett—the same way it could be with _anybody_ —and, then, abruptly, a shock of adrenaline flooding Jon’s system, it doesn’t feel familiar at all.

Lovett isn’t like any other friend Jon’s ever had, and Jon isn’t laughing anymore, and it isn’t easy anymore, either. Lovett is—something different. Something so different. And Jon’s touching him _everywhere_ , pinning his forearm behind his back, pressing him into the mattress, holding him down. He’s straddling Lovett’s hips. Lovett’s bucking beneath him, saying, voice muffled, “Get _off,_ ” but he’s laughing—“Bully,” but he’s laughing—he’s laughing and Jon’s touching him and.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. He’s getting hard. He actually is. He can feel, suddenly panicked, his dick fattening up against Lovett’s back, and knows he needs to stop, at the same moment that Lovett, who’d been wriggling like a madman, hiccuping with performative outrage, stills and says, sudden and propulsive, “My leg—”

“Sorry,” Jon’s saying, releasing Lovett and shoving himself back onto his side of the mattress. The bed’s in a complete disarray, sheets and comforters mussed and twisted. Jon brings his knees up, crouches forward over them, tries to clear his mind, tries to focus on anything but the sense memory of Lovett’s body under his, Lovett’s ass and back and his flushed neck, pink from the exertion.

“It’s fine, just a,” Lovett says, and uncurls to extend both legs behind him, so that he’s lying flat on the mess of the bed. “Leg thing,” he says.

“Sorry—”

“Stop saying _sorry_ ,” Lovett says, slightly breathless. He isn’t moving, which is good, Jon thinks, because if he moved he’d see things he just—shouldn’t have to. Shouldn’t see. “It’s fine,” Lovett says after a long moment. His head is pillowed on his arms, face turned away from Jon. “I guess I failed frat initiation.”

“Yeah,” Jon says. “You’re way too delicate for roughhousing.”

“On the bright side,” Lovett says, “the neighbors—”

Jon starts laughing despite himself, head dropping between his knees, and once he’s laughing he can’t stop, heart still racing, body thrumming with energy and arousal, no place for all of it to go.

“Eh?” Lovett says. He sounds like he’s smiling. Jon wants to know if he’s smiling.

“You always get what you want in the end, don’t you?” he says.

“—almost always,” Lovett tells him, and doesn’t turn his face to let Jon see.

 

 

Jon wakes up with a warm weight at his back. The room is full of shifting grey-white light—they didn’t close the curtains the night before, he realizes, squinting, and it’s storming again, wind whistling furiously against the window. And he’s _warm_ , an arm crooked over his side and resting loosely across his stomach. Well, not _an_ arm. Lovett’s arm.

Lovett’s holding him close, leg flung over Jon’s leg, breath hot on Jon’s neck. Jon can feel Lovett’s shirt, rucked up and shifting a little as he breathes, and he can feel Lovett’s skin, hot against his own skin, because—right—Jon’s not wearing a shirt, which—he has the vaguest memory of waking up in the night and stripping it off, dropping it over the side of the bed. He’d been cold when he fell asleep but Lovett produces more heat than anyone Jon’s ever met. And now Jon’s bare-chested and he can feel Lovett at his back, blanketing him, shifting with a sleepy murmur to press closer to Jon, arm tightening a little and—

That’s Lovett’s _dick_.

Jon can feel his pulse picking up. Lovett’s leg is trapping Jon in place, and Lovett’s dick—fat and hard—is nudged up against Jon’s ass.

Jon’s first thought is to scramble away as fast as humanly possible. His second is to stay perfectly still. What his body does instead, without permission, exactly, is shift minutely backwards into the sensation, seeking friction, and it’s horrifying—horrifying and heart-pounding—to feel Lovett, still asleep, press immediately forward in response, hitching his hips against Jon’s and settling closer, tightening his arm over Jon’s side and nuzzling the back of his neck with a sleepy sigh and a grunt.

Jon has worked in high-profile professional positions. The list of things he thinks about when he’s got an inconvenient boner has been extensively stress-tested: it’s comprehensive and effective. As a result of this list—he sat down and wrote it actually out once, grimacing straight through, then memorized and shredded it—he has _basically_ never had an erection in front of the President of the United States (pretty much). Right now, though, when he tries to summon the usual images to mind, they’re blurry and indistinct and not remotely gross or off-putting enough to stop his dick from stiffening at the feeling of Lovett’s body wrapped around him, Lovett’s dick snug against the small of his back, just one worn layer of cotton separating them from—fuck.

If he moves—he could throw his legs over the side of the bed, cast Lovett’s arm off, stand up quick before Lovett really has a chance to wake up, and then act normal, act like nothing happened.

Or he could close his eyes against the dim light of the early morning, will himself grimly back to sleep, let Lovett be the one to wake up and deal with this, extract himself, go to the bathroom to—

Jesus Christ. The image of Lovett jacking off in the bathroom while Jon sleeps—

Lovett sighs again, a soft exhalation against the nape of Jon’s neck that makes him shiver.

Choice A, choice B, or—or Jon could just keep lying here, awake, pretending this is something it’s not—soaking it up for as long as it lasts. He could do that, right?

Jon closes his eyes. He can hear the wind picking up outside, the sound of the trees, branches weighed down with ice and snow, creaking beneath the onslaught. Lovett’s arm is heavy across his chest, but his fingertips are brushing Jon’s skin so lightly that every time he breathes, or Jon breathes, or a draft slips across the bed, they shift a little bit, just enough that Jon feels electrified again.

Why shouldn’t he have this? Just for one minute—no harm intended—not taking any liberties, hands inside the car—why shouldn’t he?

Jon’s been so _good_. It sounds, even inside his own head, like the kind of thing only a dirtbag would say. But it’s true, it’s true in a way that makes him burn—he’s looked at Lovett and thought, what do I want? And thought, you’re so _important_ , and thought, better not risk it. Even when Lovett gestures and Jon’s eyes catch on his hands as they clench in the air, even when he stretches to grab something from a high shelf and his shirt rides up, revealing a strip of skin at his waist that makes Jon’s mouth water, even when _lying in bed reading to me while I doze off, cackling in the snow, stealing all the covers, kicking my leg under the table and rolling his eyes and making me laugh till I can’t breathe_ —

Even _then_ , Jon has tried, steadfastly, not to think too much about what it would be like to have Lovett all the time. What it would be like to wake up in Lovett’s arms—Lovett’s _arms_ , the thoughts he’s tamped down about these arms—

Well, he’s in ‘em now.

And he’s warm, and he’s safe, still sleep-hazy, and they’re alone, and he knows, suddenly, achingly, just how much he wants this—actually, absolutely, for real—

Which is of course when Lovett stirs.

Lovett must, Jon thinks, be disoriented, because the second his breathing shifts—from slow and deep and steady into a sudden, catching yawn—he flattens a hand against Jon’s abs and scratches a little, rolling his hips and his hard-on into Jon’s back, and says, “Mmm, hey,” so gravelly and indistinct that Jon almost can’t make out the word. Then, as Jon full-body shivers beneath the feeling of Lovett’s nails against his stomach, Lovett stiffens, as if he’s figured out where he is, and Jon feels him shift, tensing his hips back so that there’s at least a hairsbreadth between them. “Hey,” he says again, a little more comprehensible but voice still sleep-shot, no apparent discomfort in his tone. “What time’s it?”

“—Dunno,” Jon says after a strangled moment. He wants to press back again. He doesn’t want Lovett to move his arm, which he _hasn’t_ , he hasn’t yet—

“Minnesota’s making you lazy,” Lovett says.

Jon shrugs a little beneath Lovett’s arm. “Warm,” he says, and there’s a pause before Lovett says, roughly, “See? I _am_ good for something.”

Jon hmmms. His heart is beating fast. He feels like he’s drifting in one direction, reality in the other, like something’s happening in the air, some electric current, some _maybe now_ — 

“You stole all the covers again,” Jon says, clearing his throat a little. It’s a wrench to get the words out—he doesn’t seem to be thinking clearly, brain foggy and offline while his body sinks into the sensation of being here, being held, straining for more.

Across the room, someone’s phone dings once, then again, then falls silent. _Don’t move_ , Jon thinks, and, as if he can hear, Lovett doesn’t. He stays frozen, impossibly still, at Jon’s back, and Jon lets his arm, curled into his own side, twitch so that his fingers just brush Lovett’s. It doesn’t make sense that this one touch could feel like a jolt when Lovett is plastered against him in fifteen places, but it does—and not just for him. Lovett’s breathing changes, gets sharper, shallower.

“Sorry,” Lovett says, finally, lowly— _What? Oh_ —and then, tentatively, as if he thinks Jon might protest, tightens his arm the littlest bit around Jon’s waist.

Jon’s painfully aware that he’s hard—he can’t _remember_ the last time he was this hard—and that Lovett’s hand is inches away from knowing it, intimately. If he let himself, he thinks he’d be panting with the effort of not bucking his hips, begging for something, some friction. He’s so tense that he’s borderline ready to hump the bed right now, just fuck the mattress till he comes in his shorts like a desperate teenager. Instead, he’s expending most of his energy trying to keep his breathing regular and barely managing it. It gets harder still when Lovett, apparently emboldened, tightens his hand against Jon’s abs, squeezing, and bends his face the slightest bit closer to Jon’s neck, breath hot and quick on his sensitized skin. Jon exhales shakily. “Lovett,” he says.

“Yeah?” Lovett says. His voice is hoarse.

Jon hesitates maybe one second. Then—fuck it—he puts his hand on top of Lovett’s.

It’s hard for Jon to track the order in which things happen, rapidly, next. He’s pretty sure Lovett groans, fingers flexing back against Jon’s, and finally, finally lets his lips touch the nape of Jon’s neck; and he’s _pretty_ sure that’s when, unable to stop himself, he settles back until he can feel Lovett’s dick against his crack again; and he thinks that’s when Lovett’s mouth falls open and he says, “Fuck— _Jon_ ,” voice breaking almost into a whine, hips stuttering forward, but—maybe it happens differently—who _knows_ , Jon doesn’t _know_ , it turns out he’s losing his mind. He can’t _think_. He can only groan when Lovett’s leg tightens where it’s flung across Jon’s thigh, locking their hips together—can only half-swallow a gasp and clench his fingers around Lovett’s, drawing Lovett’s hand down the flat plane of his stomach, down beneath the waistband of his boxers, and wrapping it around his cock, hissing audibly when Lovett’s fingers, after a frozen moment, finally tighten and stroke once, experimentally.

“Shit,” Lovett says, shakily, near his ear, “Jon, _shit_ ,” and then he’s humping forward against Jon’s ass; Jon’s thrusting into his fist; he’s _fucking_ Lovett’s _fist_ and it feels so goddamn fucking good Jon thinks he might die.

“You’ve got a perfect dick,” Lovett says breathlessly, “Fuck—” He’s biting Jon’s neck, now, and sucking messy kisses down to the junction of his shoulder, murmuring, “Perfect, pretty dick, feels so good in my hand.”

Jon can hear himself whining. He almost can’t believe he’s the one making these noises, curling in on himself, core clenching, as Lovett jacks him off—Lovett’s _jacking him off_ —and Lovett’s moaning, too, breathing hard and fucking artlessly against his ass, no rhythm, just plastered against Jon’s back and grinding like he couldn’t stop if he tried.

“Okay,” Lovett says, nonsensical, flicking his thumb across the head of Jon’s cock and smearing precum down the shaft. He shifts his grip, then stills. “Okay, fuck—”

“ _Move_ ,” Jon grits out, but Lovett’s pulling his hand away instead, “Shh,” and bringing it to Jon’s lips, which part before he even knows what he’s doing, Lovett’s fingers slipping into his mouth, crooking against his cheek. They taste salty.

“Suck,” Lovett says, low, in his ear, and Jon does it thoughtlessly. “Jon,” Lovett says—his thumb is stroking the line of Jon’s jaw—then, “Okay,” and withdraws, panting when Jon chases after him.

When he wraps his hand back around Jon’s cock, it’s slicker than before, and he’s talking more, mouth right up against Jon’s ear. “So good, you feel so good, are you gonna give it to me—”

It’s hot and tight and suddenly too much—Jon can’t—he wants it to not be over, wants to stay here, right on the edge, for another year or five.

Instead, he comes hard and fast, spurting up onto his own stomach, cock twitching when Lovett says, “ _Fuck_ , you actually _did,_ ” voice wrecked. He thunks his forehead onto Jon’s shoulder while he strokes him through the aftershocks, until Jon’s so sensitive he almost can’t bear it, whining away from Lovett’s grip. Lovett’s hips are pistoning harder and harder against Jon’s ass. Then he’s coming, too, stutteringly, groaning through it and letting his hand fall away to rest against Jon’s stomach.

Jon’s awareness of their surroundings filters back slowly. He feels like he’s been running for hours. His heart is jackhammering in his chest. He’s panting hard, and he can hear Lovett panting, too, forehead still braced against Jon’s shoulder.

The wind seems to have picked up again, or maybe Jon’s ears are ringing a little; and when Jon glances across at the window, he’s struck by the ferocity of the snow, the deep, blurry white of the storm; it’s the kind of weather you really could get lost in, even safely indoors.

Jon blinks, dazed, then closes his eyes and tries to regain some semblance of sense. It’s important to—to know what you’re doing, what your plan is, but Jon has no _clue_ —he isn’t even sure how this happened. He isn’t even sure who _started_ it. The past—five minutes? ten?—are so hazy and unbelievable. He only realizes how hard he’s clenching his eyes shut when he starts to see shapes behind the lids.

What’s he supposed to do now?

Jon’s not, broadly speaking, _bad_ at handling the unexpected. When Trump won, he hauled himself out of bed and faced facts and founded a company and looked the thing head-on. Not that getting a half-asleep handjob from Lovett is like Trump winning the presidency. But not that it’s _not_ , too, in a kind of microcosmic way, when you consider the implications it bears for Jon’s personal State of the Nation. Talk about the destruction of norms.

The truth is: the longer they lie here, saying nothing, sticky and still touching, the more Jon wonders if he might just never move again. He feels like a window that’s been hit hard but hasn’t yet shattered, covered in a dense cobweb of cracks—like maybe if he stays perfectly still, the pieces won’t ever fall to the floor.

The sick thing, though, is that, even scared of what he’ll see on Lovett’s face—he still wants to see it. Maybe it’ll be awful. Maybe there’ll be regret, or discomfort, or the dawning realization that Jon is a shitty, secretive coward who’s been packing his best-friend-boner to the left all weekend while quietly, privately dreaming of doing things to Lovett that make him wanna preemptively clear the browser history in his own brain. But he needs to know what Lovett looks like, probably still a little zonked and out-of-it, sleepy and sex-dopey; wants to find out whether his throat and chest get flushed, whether there’s come in the hair on his stomach; wants to watch Lovett watch _him_. He feels greedy to the point of recklessness. _Gimme_ , he thinks. _I want it_ , he thinks. _Please,_ he thinks, a little ashamed of his own hunger, and says nothing. He just doesn’t know what to say.

“Okay,” Lovett says eventually. “Well. I didn’t see that coming.”

Jon makes a noncommittal noise. His stomach swoops. Lovett spoke first—of course Lovett spoke first. Lovett’s braver than Jon. Lovett says things when things need to be said.

“Which makes sense,” Lovett says after a moment’s silence. “Out of the prediction game. No longer in the business of pretending to know anything.”

Jon doesn’t say anything.

“But _still_ ,” Lovett says.

Maybe he dreamed the whole thing. That’s not impossible, is it? A lucid dream? Maybe he’ll wake up in a minute and find out that he came in his shorts in the night, and _that’ll_ be embarrassing, yeah, but still—

“...You know that episode of Buffy where the high school is haunted by that creepy student-teacher couple, and the ghosts keep possessing people and forcing them to relive their horrible inappropriate doomed relationship? Anyway, do you think this inn is haunted? By, like, a ghost that’s making us reenact some tragic 1800s love affair?” Lovett pauses. “If it’s haunted,” he says, “this is probably a horror story, which ends worse for us than, like, a porno. I mean, we already did the porno part, so maybe now just a fade to black—you know, at some point we’re gonna have to look at each other again.”

Definitely not a dream. He couldn’t make this shit up. He hmmms, a little desperately.

“I mean, we work together,” Lovett says.

“We _work_ together?” Jon repeats, finally, incredulous even through his anxiety.

Lovett’s hand twitches against Jon’s chest. “Oversimplification for brevity’s sake,” he says. “Look, just turn over, okay?”

“ _You_ turn over,” Jon says, knee-jerk.

There’s a beat.

“I think this is going great,” Lovett says, just as Jon says, “Okay, okay,” feeling hot across the bridge of his nose, and flips over in the bed.

Lovett’s eyes are wide. That’s the first thing Jon notices. He’s still breathing a little raggedly, and his gaze, after an immediate dart down to the—Christ—come still striped across Jon’s stomach—locks purposefully back onto Jon’s face. He looks—why did Jon think he wouldn’t?—pretty much exactly like he did before they—did whatever they did. Familiar and flushed. His hair is flat on one side, sticking up wildly on the other. When Jon glances down the length of his body (What? If _Lovett_ is allowed—) his eyes get caught on the sight of his stomach, beneath his rucked-up t-shirt ( _Jon’s_ t-shirt, Jesus), and the wet stain on the front of his boxer briefs. Jon wants him to take the shirt off so he can get a good look, but instead, Lovett’s arm twitches a little at his side, nudging the fabric back down.

“ _Thank_ you,” Lovett says.

“For—”

“For turning _over_ ,” Lovett says. “Pervert,” he adds faintly.

“Any time,” Jon tells him.

“—At least now our neighbors won’t think we’re sexless and depressing,” Lovett says.

“I wasn’t _that_ loud,” Jon says.

“Yeah,” Lovett says, “not to, like, impugn your manhood or—”

“I don’t think being quiet is _manly_ —”

“It _is_ a really nice room,” Lovett says, gaze darting around, looking anywhere but at Jon. “This would _never_ have happened in a Marriott.”

“Okay,” Jon says, stung. “I have actually, like, aroused attraction without the help of a bed and breakfast before—”

“Obviously you’re _attractive,_ ” Lovett says, “you don’t need to smack me over the head with it, hello, I have eyes, I’m just _saying_.” He reaches one arm up to rap at the headboard demonstratively. “If we were at a Marriott, everything would be beige _and_ this would be padded.”

“Padded headboards are comfortable,” Jon says.

Lovett finally looks at him, face screwed up in disbelief. “I am talking about mood-making,” he says, and then: “Oh my God, it actually _is_ the furniture.”

“What?”

“The furniture _wants_ people to fuck. It’s like, imbued with built-up energies. _Look_ at it—it’s all—solid, and… suggestive… you know, I think bed and breakfasts aren’t legally allowed to purchase furniture that hasn’t been christened by at least a thousand people?”

“You sound insane,” Jon says.

“I gave you a _handjob_ ,” Lovett says incredulously.

 _And came on my ass_ , Jon thinks, slightly aggrieved. “Okay, well, I’m sorry if it traumatized you,” he says instead, trying not to sound snide.

“It’s fine,” Lovett says. His eyes drift down to Jon’s chest again. “You’re really, uh,” he says. “It’s, like, gross.” He reaches out a little, as if he might touch—then draws his hand back, a startled little movement, like he’s still not awake, not completely in control of what he’s doing.

 _You can_ , Jon thinks. _I want_ , Jon thinks.

“ _Gross_?” he says instead, and pulls a face.

“What do you want me to say?” Lovett doesn’t look angry, but he doesn’t look happy either—he isn’t gaping anymore, and his brow is slightly furrowed. “You know what you look like. What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Jon says, and then, impulsively: “Tell me you like it.”

“Don’t start with me,” Lovett says instead, rolling his eyes, the gesture achingly familiar even under these radically unfamiliar circumstances.

“Come on,” Jon says. “You can say it.” He reaches out for Lovett and then, once he’s reaching, can’t seem to stop, leveraging himself up as Lovett shies away and swinging a knee across so that he’s straddling his waist. He’s pricklingly conscious of the cold, and of his bare chest, and of the way it feels to have Lovett safely trapped beneath him. He stays braced above him for a moment before settling, thrilling when Lovett hisses and shudders at Jon’s weight pressing down on his still-hard, hypersensitive dick.

“Jon—”

“Come on,” Jon says again. He rubs his hands distractedly up and down his own thighs. He wants, the urge itchy and uncomfortable, to palm Lovett’s pecs, which look soft and tempting through the thin fabric of his t-shirt; wants to shuck that t-shirt up and off, to rub a flat hand across Lovett’s stomach, through the mess he made of himself; wants to touch his nipples and his pale throat, wants to hold his hands, pin him, rub off again against his sweat-slick stomach.

“You look good,” Lovett says, his voice, low and sleep-rough, cutting through the whir of possibilities. He tips his chin up, looks Jon right in the eyes, then cuts his gaze away suddenly, blinking as if he’d stared into a too-bright light. “Is that what you want—”

“Yeah,” Jon says. He clenches his hands.

“You know you look good,” Lovett says, and closes his eyes, then flings an arm across them for good measure. “Jesus, what’s in the _water_ in this fucking state?”

“It’s not—” Jon says.

“Stop,” Lovett says, “Just—can we just not—”

“You look good, too,” Jon says.

Lovett pulls his arm up at that, but only, Jon thinks wryly, in order to communicate the full strength of his disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?”

“You really don’t have a period of post-coital calm, huh,” Jon says. He wants to touch Lovett’s cheek, thumb his lower lip. _You look good—_ what a small and insufficient thing to have said.

“Tell your abs to stop staring at me,” Lovett says nonsensically, and covers his face again with a disgruntled groan. For a long moment he doesn’t say anything. Then, with a heavy breath, he slaps Jon’s thigh. “Get up,” he says, “I’m gonna pee. Brush my teeth. Pee and brush my teeth. Get _up,_ ” shoving at Jon until he unseats himself, flipping back onto his side of the bed.

Jon doesn’t let himself shift to watch Lovett as he swings himself onto the floor and pads across the room, closing the bathroom door behind him after a moment of silent hesitation. When he hears the _click_ of the latch, he lets himself exhale, finally, long and shaky, and drops onto his back to stare up at the white ceiling.

 _What are you_ doing _,_ he asks himself.

No response, except for the same warm wanting feeling that’s been building since—how does he even _think_ about this? Since _for a few months_. Since _for a while now_. Since _you’ve always been my friend, but this past year it turned out you were my person, my ride-or-die, my you-say-jump, I-say-how-high?_

It feels good—of course it feels good—he feels warm and sated and a little reckless, in that way that revs his engine—that way that means, sure, if you gave him fifteen minutes he could get it up again, no problem, and go again—and again—

But it’s also—

Jon gets out of bed and goes to check his phone. The texts, it looks like, were for both of them. _SOS, you guys still with me? Did you Thunderdome each other?_ Tommy has messaged, which—right, he’d texted the night before, a long thread in their group chat: updates about how the meetings went, details of the flight he'd booked back to SF, questions about whether he should expect them back in LA for the pod on Monday, or—

But he and Lovett had been lying on the floor, giggling, Lovett getting grease all over the Ayn Rand and pulling faces as he read aloud through big bites of pizza. And when Jon, scrolling through the texts on his lock screen, went to respond, Lovett had yelped, “No _phones_ ,” which made Jon giggle even _more_ , for the novelty alone; and anyway, one way or another neither of them responded for the rest of the night.

Jon hesitates, then tabs back and opens a new message to Tommy alone. _Do we have an HR rep?_ he says, then pauses, then deletes it, then retypes it and hits send.

 _What the fuck did you do?_ Tommy responds a second later.

What the fuck did he do? What the fuck did he _do_? If Jon knew what he did, he thinks, looking down at the phone in his hands, he might have some idea what to do _next_.

Jon’s gaze refocuses at the soft thwwp of another incoming message right on the heels of the first. _Please don’t make me regret the fact that I signed legally binding paperwork with both of you._

 _I don’t—_ he starts to type, but the bathroom door swings open before he can work out what he does or doesn’t. Lovett wanders out. His face looks damp and so, Jon thinks, ears heating up, does the fabric across his crotch.

“If you want,” Lovett says, gesturing nonchalantly behind him as he crosses the room. _Nonchalantly_. Unbelievable. “Who texted?”

“Just Tommy,” Jon says, standing, stomach flipping as Lovett takes a simultaneous step back and turns towards the desk. It’s fine, he thinks, it’s just—fine. “He’s being dramatic,” Jon says, and takes a breath.

“You disappear for a couple days and someone’s _right_ in there trying to steal your shtick,” Lovett says. “Unbelievable.”

 _Jinx,_ Jon thinks. “Yeah,” he says instead, like the boring broken record he is, and goes to brush his own teeth.

 

 

When Jon comes back out of the bathroom, Lovett’s stooped over his phone, still plugged in on the other side of the room. He doesn’t acknowledge Jon, who walks, for lack of anything better to do, back to the bed and sits down.

“If you liked yesterday in Trump’s America,” Lovett says, waving his phone vaguely above his shoulder, not looking over, “you’re gonna _love_ what’s already on the docket today.” He rises and seems momentarily at a loss, then wanders over to the window, pushes the half-open curtains all the way to one side, and stands there staring out at the storm, lifting his shirt to scratch at his stomach and chest.

Lovett in the white light of the window looks **—** like art, Jon thinks, _good_ art, the kind in which nothing is neat or at right angles. He looks wild, stilled, even for a moment, only by the grace of God; he looks restive and beautiful and intensely alive.

He also looks, one hand pressed to the glass, like he’s considering whether or not to fling the heavy frame open and leap right out into the storm, never to be seen or heard from again.

“Hey,” Jon says hoarsely, heading him off at the pass, if only to forestall a PR nightmare. Lovett turns slowly, like he’s not sure what he’ll find when he glances back at the bed. But Jon just says, “Come here,” and—stomach-turning miracle—Lovett does, not quite hesitant but cautious, like a horse which might spook, and which you know might crush you if it does. He approaches until he’s standing between Jon’s legs, arms crossed across his chest, looking assessingly down.

“Can I tell you something?” Lovett says.

 _I hope so,_ Jon thinks. “Sure,” he says.

Lovett looks impassive. “I don’t trust this,” he says, shifting to itch one foot against his other ankle.

Something Jon learned while working in the White House: take note of your first reaction to something scary. Pack it up and store it for later use. Then stand still and pretend not to be afraid while you figure out how to tackle the worst case scenario.

“What do you mean,” he says, barely blinking. “You don’t trust _me_?”

“I don’t trust this whole—what are you—” Lovett says, cutting himself off to glance down at Jon’s hand, hesitant on his hip.

“I don’t know,” Jon says.

“ _I_ don’t know,” Lovett snaps. He’s still looking at Jon’s hand, shivering when Jon strokes his thumb tentatively under the hem of his shirt, against the soft skin of his side. “What are we _doing_?” he asks, in a strange, feverish tone.

“Can I kiss you?” Jon says.

Lovett’s gaze does cut up at that. “That is _exactly_ what I’m talking about—” he says, but anything that’s not an immediate abrasive _no_ from Lovett is usually pretty much a _yes_. So Jon slides his hand up Lovett’s side, trying not to feel like an idiot for having asked, cups a hand around the back of Lovett’s head, draws him down, slow, so that he could stop it if he wanted but he doesn’t—he doesn’t do anything except let himself be pulled close, taking one shallow breath before Jon kisses him.

Lovett’s mouth tastes like Listerine. Jon thinks about him standing at the bathroom sink, gargling, in case Jon wanted to—and Jon _does_ want to—and lets his hand flex around the back of Lovett’s neck, feeling Lovett tense and tense and then, slowly, give in, lips softening, mouth opening, his own hand coming to rest hesitantly on Jon’s cheek. Jon can’t help turning his face into the touch so that Lovett’s lips slide to the corner of his mouth for a moment, his kiss impossibly gentle.

Then Jon’s letting himself fall back onto the bed before he can consider it, pulling Lovett along with him, cupping his ass while he scrambles, their mouths separating for one horrible moment and then they’re connecting _again_ , soft, lingering kisses that get wild, slick, open-mouthed, and then taper off again, Lovett’s fingers on Jon’s face, Jon’s hand tight on Lovett’s waist, so tight he thinks he might leave prints. _Good_ , he thinks, and threads his other hand through Lovett’s hair, holding him in place, controlling the pace.

Jon can’t get enough of the reality of Lovett’s body, solid and increasingly pliant against him. He slides an arm around Lovett’s back, tugs him as close as he can, kissing him as his breath hitches, as he settles in, hand braced on the bed by Jon’s ear. Jon can feel his dick stirring again and grinds up, clenching a hand against Lovett’s back, his ass, when Lovett groans and grinds back.

“Fuck,” Lovett murmurs against Jon’s mouth, “we’re not twenty anymore, asshole.”

“Yeah,” Jon says, “but we can try.” He noses at Lovett’s neck until Lovett tips his head to one side, lets Jon in to nuzzle at the soft skin under his ear, sucking experimentally and listening as Lovett’s breathing gets heavy and irregular.

“Fuck,” he says again, and then, shifting back against Jon’s protestations until they’re face to face but not— _kissing_ anymore, which Jon _hates_ —says, “Jon, seriously, have you—oh my _God,_ ” when Jon worms a hand all the way up his back, under his shirt, “ _Hey_ ,” trying to snap his fingers, fumbling, instead, “Okay, can you—”

“Okay—” Jon says.

“Focus _up_.”

“Okay, okay,” Jon says, but doesn’t move his hand.

Lovett’s face is flushed. His lips are red and wet. “Have you, uh,” he says, then doesn’t say anything for a moment, looking uncharacteristically at a loss. “Fuck,” he says, and drops his head for a moment, close enough that Jon can kiss his forehead while he worries his fingers under the waistband of his boxer briefs. “No, okay.” He raises his face again to peer down at Jon, and finally gets the whole question out by visible dint of effort: “Have you _done_ this before?”

Of course Lovett wants someone who _has_. Jon can, like. He can extrapolate that.

“About ten minutes ago,” he says, and squints up at Lovett, whose face is haloed with light from the window.“Give or take,” he adds, a little ruefully.

“Well,” Lovett says, after a queer pause, “if you’re gonna experiment, of course I’d rather you did it at home.”

“Ha ha,” Jon says. It’s clear how the thing must feel from Lovett’s point of view: how inartful Jon must seem. It’s to Jon’s discredit, he thinks, that this knowledge won’t stop him from begging with his whole body for more. He’ll stay here in this bed, kissing Lovett, gripping his sides, stroking the smooth bow of his back, for as long as Lovett will let him.

“This is crazy,” Lovett says.

“Yeah,” Jon says.

“We shouldn’t—”

“Lovett—”

“Okay,” Lovett says abruptly, and he’s kissing Jon again, wilder, hips shifting against Jon’s, “Okay, we can—”

“Just try me,” Jon says, breathless, and takes Lovett’s face between his hands.

Kissing Lovett is like—it’s like the feeling Jon gets when he looks at puppies, sometimes, which he knows is _crazy_ , the feeling that he can look at something, and hold it, and think it’s perfect, and still have none of that be enough—still be left with a huge well of wanting-more that nothing can fill or fix.

Whatever decision Lovett came to—whatever facts he considered, however he puzzled them together—he’s not hesitant anymore: he’s insistent, almost agitated with arousal, gripping Jon’s biceps and groping his chest while they make out, whining when Jon pulls away for a second to gasp, “Come on, let’s—” and clambers back, urging Lovett along with him, so that they’re fully on the bed, no risk of tumbling over the edge as they grapple with each other, Lovett squirming to bite at Jon’s pecs and collarbone, rutting desperately against his thigh.

It’s such a turnaround—a turnaround on top of a turnaround—that Jon feels the same way he did switching repeatedly between warm buildings and the cold outdoors a few days ago, his whole body thrumming with indecision about what’s happening, about how it should respond. He can’t think straight to figure out how Lovett feels, why he was feverish to start, then reluctant, or why he’s desperate again now, all-in, hyper-focused—

It occurs to Jon with an awful jolt that Lovett, who’s warm and wild and murmuring something indistinguishable into the junction of Jon’s neck and shoulder, might come again any second now, shoot off in his already damp boxer briefs, and—what—climb out of bed, _again_ , cross to the window, _again_ , get that look on his face _again_ that means, _too much,_ that means _, I can’t_ —and Jon will never have gotten to see his cock, or get a fist around it, or suck its slick, dripping head into his mouth, look up through his lashes at Lovett falling apart. The whole situation feels inordinately good and unbearably tenuous at the same time, too much happening too quickly for Jon to get a grip on, he needs—more, more of everything, more _time—_

Lovett’s kissing down his chest, now. Shaking his shoulders and dragging him up and away from the task at hand feels like heartburn, his whole body shouting at him not to risk a sure thing, but—

“Come up here, can you just—” Jon says, and tugs at Lovett until he settles back across Jon’s waist, hips hitching, rutting their cocks together through the thin fabric of their boxer briefs. “I wanna…”

“Change your mind?” Lovett says. He’s barely even frowning. Jesus.

“ _No_ ,” Jon says, “I just want—”

“What—”

“I don’t wanna rush,” he says. “Okay? Can we just—not rush?”

Lovett looks momentarily, uncharacteristically impassive. Jon can’t resist—he spreads his hands across Lovett’s thighs, grips them tight, leans into the feeling of Lovett’s muscles twitching beneath the touch. He needs, he thinks wildly, to get Lovett’s _goddamn shirt off_. “You’re being—” Lovett starts.

“I _know_ ,” Jon says, and rubs his palms roughly up Lovett’s thighs until he’s gripping his waist. “Come on,” he says. “It’ll be—” he has no idea what to say—“fun—” _Fun?_ Fuck—

“Let’s take the day off,” he says finally, shifting his head on the pillow to gaze up at Lovett’s unreadable face.

Lovett doesn’t do anything for a moment. Then, still expressionless, he bends forward, hips shifting in Jon’s hold, to brace his hands on either side of Jon’s head, staring him down. Jon feels strangely, squirmily vulnerable, nowhere really to turn, nothing to do but stay quiet and let Lovett search his face for—something. Who knows. Whatever it is, he must find it, because something shifts—Lovett grinds back on Jon’s sensitive dick so that he hisses, bending to kiss Jon, barely, and say, close to his ear, “Is this on the company dime or what?”

“The company dime is, like, your savings account, Lovett,” Jon tells him.

“So I’m paying for you,” Lovett says, faux-thoughtfully. “ _Very_ scandalous. In five years, when you’re running for office, this is gonna come out and sink your campaign.”

“No receipts,” Jon says, and presses up into another kiss, and another.

It feels like they make out for hours. Jon is achingly, pantingly hard, but for once in his life, he doesn’t wanna come. He doesn’t want to do anything that would break the tension building between them, the strange, incredible freedom of getting to touch Lovett any way he likes, getting to feel Lovett shock and shudder into the sensation.

When the cold air gets to be too much, Jon pulls the covers across Lovett’s back and then over their heads, trapping the two of them in a close, warm cave. Under the covers, he can hear Lovett’s breath, can feel it hot on his face.

“Hi,” he says, so fucking dumb, but all Lovett does is say it back, only a little mockingly, “hi,” before kissing him again, gentle, careful, tugging at Jon’s lower lip with his teeth.

Jon spreads his hands under Lovett’s shirt, wide across his back, and feels Lovett shiver. “I hate your stupid shirt,” he murmurs nonsensically.

“Don’t,” Lovett says. But then he’s thrashing into action, wrestling it up and over his head, moving Jon’s hands to help, and throwing it out from under their fort. The sharp motion lets a gust of cold air in, but Jon doesn’t care because now he can touch Lovett’s bare chest, the small, tight peaks of his nipples; can palm his pecs and the softness of his stomach.

“Remember,” Lovett says, voice hushed and wry, “if you wanted to fuck, like, a super fit friend, I’m sure you and Tommy could come to some kind of—”

He doesn’t get the chance to suggest anything. Instead, he’s _oof_ ing, all the breath going out of him as Jon surges up, flips him onto his back and out into the open again where he can watch the cold air hit Lovett’s nipples, can watch them tighten even more, and where he can press Lovett against the mattress and take in the way he looks, which is just—a _lot_ , too much, almost too much to bear.

“I was just _saying_ ,” Lovett says, almost squeaking as Jon bends his head and sucks one of his sweet pink nipples into his mouth, worrying it with his teeth until Lovett’s kicking the bed beneath him, wriggling like he wants to get away but still— _God, it’s so good—_ clenching a fist around the back of Jon’s head like he wants more, more and less, hot and cold, Lovett could—he could change his mind a million times and Jon would still be with him, he would.

He goes back and forth between Lovett’s nipples for a while, kisses his collarbones, too, and down the line of his sternum to the trail of hair leading into his boxer briefs, which is new—it’s all new—but good. He rubs his stubbly cheek against it and feels Lovett’s hips buck up, cock hard as a hammer. And then he’s sliding back up Lovett’s body, spreading _himself_ like a blanket across Lovett, gathering all his limbs in and sucking more kisses onto his pale neck—kisses he’ll get to _see_ later—grinding down when he can, letting off when it starts to feel like he might come by accident, unintentionally, everything too much.

Lovett makes such good sounds—the best sounds Jon has ever heard—and after a while, he’s so limp with pleasure that he seems almost drunk on it. His hips are hitching continuously, and he whines when Jon lets up pressure, half-shouts when Jon pinches his nipple unexpectedly or scrubs a rough hand across the tented fabric of his boxer briefs, so that Jon has to muffle his outbursts with kiss after deep kiss.

At some point—time is becoming so meaningless that it feels like a whole year might have passed in this bed—Jon kisses up his jawline to Lovett’s ear, and then, without meaning to, starts to talk, not even sure what he’s saying—“Is it good,” more intensely than he means to, “Is it—”

When Lovett doesn’t say anything, he stills until Lovett keens and says, low and expulsive, “Egomaniac.” He’s nodding, though, nodding frantically, clutching Jon close and gasping, which means, Jon thinks, that it’s _true._ Jon wants to make Lovett list every single thing he likes about Jon, about Jon's body, about the way Jon’s touching him—he wants to hold Lovett down and do the same back, even when Lovett squirms away like he doesn’t want to hear it—he wants to tell Lovett how good he looks, how unbearably good, how much Jon—

“Okay,” Lovett says suddenly, more a burst of breath than a word. He nudges Jon up, shoving at his chest. “Just,” he says—his face, Jon realizes, is flushed from the scrape of Jon’s stubble, his nipples red from being sucked and bitten, he looks—thoroughly debauched, Jon doesn’t want to _stop_ —“Let’s just,” Lovett says unevenly, “Take—time-out. Right? Is that sports?”

“You know it is,” Jon says, and then, “Why?” only hearing as it comes out how strange and plaintive it sounds.

Lovett takes a deep breath. His pupils are dilated and his chest is rising and falling rapidly. Jon wants—lazy, half-formed thought—to wreck him so completely that he can’t move for a month. “Because you’re in a real twelve impossible things before breakfast mood,” Lovett says, “and it’s really—hard for me to keep up with you right now.”

“...That’s a first,” Jon says, but he rolls obediently off Lovett, trying to think through the insistent throbbing of his dick. He watches as Lovett swings his feet right onto the floor and stands. He’s visibly, mouth-wateringly hard; Jon can see the tip of his dick trapped in the band of his boxer briefs, and watches hungrily as Lovett adjusts himself, clenching his eyes closed and hissing indistinctly when he gets a hand around his cock, taking deep, obvious breaths as he packs it to the left. Jon wants to see it. He wants to see it, he wants to see it, he wants—

“Sure,” Lovett says, “ _this_ is definitely the first we should be focusing on. Jesus, Jon, stop looking at my dick, we’re never gonna make it to breakfast on time if—God—I feel like I don’t even _know_ you.”

 _Well_ , Jon thinks, as Lovett bends to swipe his jeans off the floor, _me neither_ , and rolls resignedly off the other side of the bed to get dressed himself.

 

 

The dining room looks completely different, somehow, even though nothing’s changed, everything in its same place. Jon’s ninety percent sure that nothing here has been moved in about a hundred years. But Jon likes it all so much more now, and maybe he should say that in his Yelp review: “Decor greatly improved by having _done it_ with Jonathan Ira Lovett.” They’ve made it downstairs just as breakfast service is ending—“The cook’s leaving,” the waitress says apologetically. But she brings them fruit salad and little boxes of cereal, and coffee, which is, Lovett says, all he needs.

“If I drink this,” he says lowly as she retreats, having left her carafe on the table at Lovett’s insistence, “and try to—touch your knee or something—and it turns out this was all a hallucination brought on by caffeine deprivation, and you renounce me and call me, like, a gay predator, and then scam me out of my shares in our company and I have to march into the Mar-a-Largo screaming, ‘Sorry, my Prada’s at the cleaners!—’”

“Well, that would certainly be an exciting, if uncharacteristic, response on my part,” Jon says, weighing the merits of Great Grains versus Honey Nut Cheerios. Settling on the former, he pours the cereal into his bowl.

“I would jump off a cliff,” Lovett says, spearing a piece of melon and shoving it into his mouth, then washing it down ( _disgusting_ , Jon thinks wonderingly) with another swig of steaming coffee, wincing at the heat. “I don’t wanna waste my death,” he says, swallowing, “so I’d blame it on Trump, and I guess you’d be off the hook. But you’d _know_.”

“A cliff,” Jon repeats.

“For the optics,” Lovett says.

Jon considers this through a bite of cereal. “Are you gonna let this go when you finish that cup?”

“Maybe after one more,” Lovett says. He reaches for the carafe. “They’re very small.”

Lovett drinks another cup, and then another, with the slightly desperate air of somebody stalling for time. An older couple is sitting at a little table by the far dining room window, playing cards, but they don’t seem interested in Jon and Lovett, and don’t turn to watch when, during his third cup of coffee, Lovett noisily thunks his feet up onto an empty chair. There’s a hole in the big toe of his left sock, and Jon can see his pale skin peeking through. He wonders if this is how the Victorians felt, tucked in by their hearths in their big drafty houses, ogling each other’s wrists and ankles.

“What are you looking at,” Lovett says after a moment, peering over the rim of his cup. He looks suspicious, a little self-conscious, shoulders hunching up towards his ears.

“Just,” Jon says, “uh,” and then, “Come _on_ ,” when Lovett starts making that face that means, _are you kidding me_ , because it’s not _Jon’s_ fault that he isn’t.

“Don’t be cute,” Lovett says. “Jesus, can you just—”

“What?”

“— _not_ ,” Lovett says, and prickles visibly when Jon keeps looking at him, one elbow on the table, propping his cheek up on his fist. “Stop it,” he says unconvincingly. His cheeks are flushed.

“Finish your coffee already,” Jon tells him, startling himself with his own tone.

Lovett looks startled too; he swallows heavily, obviously, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Maybe I want—” he says, looking around like he might, Jesus, ask for another carafe. His fingers are tight around the porcelain, so tight that Jon thinks—just an iota more pressure and the cup could— _it won’t_ —shatter—that’s just how it _feels_ —

“You don’t—”

“Maybe I do,” Lovett says mulishly, and Jon says, low and unthinking, “You _don’t_ ,” and feels it in his stomach when Lovett freezes for a long moment, then removes his feet carefully from the empty chair; places them back on the floor; leans forward onto his knees.

“Jon—”

“I want to take you back upstairs,” Jon says. The words sound strange and awkward out in the open. He feels marble-mouthed with desire. “I want to. To go back up to our room and.”

“Do _what_ ,” Lovett says, like Jon might turn right back around, say, _nothing_ , say, _this never happened_.

“Anything,” Jon says instead. “I wanna do anything you want, okay?”

Lovett puts his cup down on the table.

“I wanna—I could—” _Say it_ , fuck, if you can’t _say_ it—“I wanna blow you—”

“Not _here_ , Jesus,” Lovett says, and then, “You _don’t_ —”

“I do,” Jon says, “you always have to make everything so difficult, I do,” reaching forward as he speaks to touch Lovett’s thigh and then, once he’s touching, unable to stop, spreading his fingers out to grip it, feeling the firmness of the muscle through his sweatpants. “I wanna get on my knees for you,” so quiet he almost can’t hear himself, “Strip you off, get my mouth around—”

“Stop,” Lovett says abruptly. He puts his hand on Jon’s, closes his eyes, and takes a deep shuddering breath. After a moment, he opens them again, shoves Jon’s hand away, reaches out and drains his cup with a single, shaky swig, then sets it heavily back down on the polished tabletop.  “Okay,” he says, and stands up.

“Yeah?” Jon shifts to look up at him. For all his time-taking before, Lovett’s vibrating with impatience now, slapping his own thigh absently, one leg jittering.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Lovett says, and kicks Jon’s ankle. “I’m not gonna survive much more of this. You’d better just—come _on_ ,” not waiting for Jon to get up before he turns on his heel and strides across the room—assuming that Jon will follow.

 

 

Jon’s barely through the door behind Lovett before Lovett’s saying, spinning back round to face Jon and standing with his fists balled up halfway to the bed, “You said—”

Jon doesn’t take the time to hear him out. He’s striding towards him in a second, catching Lovett’s face between his hands, tilting it up, drinking it in: Lovett’s stubborn chin, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes that deepen when he squints and starts again, as if Jon might hear the whole sentence and, surprised, recant all. “You _said_ you want—”

“I know what I said,” Jon says. “I don’t have short-term memory loss—”

“A serious condition for some,” Lovett says, but he’s trembling a little, one hand fisted in the fabric of Jon’s shirt. “What do I know, dude—”

“ _Dude_?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Lovett says, “can you just,” and, for once, shuts promptly up when Jon kisses him, thumbs his cheekbones, starts walking him back towards the bed. Jon can feel his heart pounding as they stumble backwards; when they hit the mattress, Jon pushes Lovett down, thrilling when Lovett whines and tries to keep kissing him, and then, in for a penny, drops to his knees. “Oh my God,” Lovett says. His hand is on Jon’s shoulder, shaking it. “Get up, you can—”

“If you say it again, I swear to God—”

“Fine,” Lovett says, “I won’t—I’m not saying anything. Okay? You want—”

“Yes—”

“ _Fine_ ,” Lovett snaps. He clenches his eyes shut when Jon reaches for the waistband of his sweats, his underwear, then unclenches them when Jon starts to tug, shifting his hips to allow it, so that they’re both watching as the head of his dick pops free. “Oh my God,” Lovett says again, and then he’s repeating himself, low and bewildered, as Jon yanks his sweatpants fully off, tosses them aside, gets his hands on Lovett’s thighs and—takes it in.

Lovett has—Jon shocks himself with the strength of his immediate reaction—a perfect dick. It’s thick and red and hard, slick at the head, genuinely mouth-watering, which is good because Jon might not know much about what he’s doing but he knows that’s pertinent. Lovett’s fists are clenching against the sheets, thighs flexing minutely under Jon’s grip, tensing further and further the longer Jon just—

“How long,” Lovett says, clipped, “are you gonna stare at it?”

—just _looks_ , but it isn’t his fault, he thinks, it’s just so—

“Done now,” Jon says, swallowing hard, and takes Lovett in his hand, so certain and unceremonious that Lovett makes an unreplicable startled sound, as if choking on air.

His cock is soft and blood-hot, and it pulses in Jon’s grip. Jon jacks it once, experimentally, sliding his fist up to the head, feeling the way the skin shifts and watching the way Lovett shudders, tipping his head back so that he’s staring at the ceiling, breathing raggedly, and then looking back down, eyes glazed and dark. Jon remembers, suddenly, Lovett murmuring in his ear— _perfect, pretty dick, feels so good in my hand—_ and strokes Lovett again, again, and then—because he wants it, because Lovett needs it—bends close and sucks the head into his mouth.

“Jon, God,” Lovett says. Jon almost can’t hear him over the rushing in his ears as he sucks, tentatively at first and then harder when Lovett keeps murmuring. His hand alights on Jon’s head, threading into his hair, not pushing, just—resting—moving with Jon as he starts to take Lovett deeper, fisting his dick, tasting the salt-slick at his slit.

He pulls off for a second, long enough to look up and see Lovett’s face, more open than it’s been yet, his mouth slack with pleasure.

“Do you—” Lovett starts.

“Yeah,” Jon says, low, and presses a kiss to the wet head of Lovett’s cock, uncurls his fingers to kiss down to the base, kissing and licking, pressing close, stomach flipping when Lovett’s fingers clench against his scalp. And then he’s sliding his mouth back onto Lovett’s dick, taking him deeper—fuck it, maybe he’ll take too much, choke on it, but he can’t stop himself—Lovett tastes so good, hot and thick and rock hard, and he’s trembling, clearly trying to keep from bucking up into Jon’s mouth.

Jon’s only been blowing him for a minute when Lovett says, “If you keep—fuck—if you keep going, I’m gonna—”

Jon still has a hand braced on Lovett’s thigh. He squeezes it and keeps taking his cock, shifting his fist to sink deeper, stomach flipping at the stretch, thinking about what _he_ likes—what he wants to give Lovett—tight, wet heat. He wants Lovett to look at his mouth a minute from now—an hour, a day, a year—and think about what Jon’s mouth felt like on him.

“Seriously,” Lovett says, pained. He’s tugging at Jon’s hair, trying to pull him off, saying, “Oh God,” again when Jon just groans. “This is—fuck—this is so undignified,” Lovett says, hand falling to grab at the meat of Jon’s shoulder, “I don’t wanna—Jon, I don’t wanna come yet, I don’t wanna, please—” But suddenly he’s clenching forward with a cry, hand painfully tight, and Jon can taste him in a hot flood, his dick pulsing into Jon’s mouth.

Jon swallows as best he can, doesn’t pull off; he digs his nails into Lovett’s thigh, sucking through it, sucking until Lovett’s saying, “Stop—” and wriggling like he can’t take it anymore, tugging at Jon’s hair again, frantic, until Jon has to pull off, even though he wants—he wants—he thinks he could suck Lovett’s dick forever, wishes he didn’t have to let up, wants to press kisses onto every inch of Lovett’s skin, bite the pale insides of his thighs until they’re mottled red with some sign that Jon was _here_ , which, it turns out, he’s actually doing, thoughtless and instinctive, nosing at the sensitive crease of Lovett’s thigh and kissing the thin skin too hard even as Lovett yelps and swears.

“Shit, shit, come on,” Lovett says, scrabbling at his shoulder, dragging him up onto the bed by his shirt. His hand is clumsy, body still twitching with aftershocks as Jon clambers across it, bends to kiss him, God, kiss him with Lovett’s come still in his mouth. “That was so,” Lovett says, arching up.

“Okay?” Jon says, hot and close.

“Okay? What is _wrong_ with you.” Lovett sounds breathless. Jon can’t see his expression, but he can imagine it, and shudders as Lovett pets his face and shoulders, shucking his shirt up and off in an awful tangle, trying to kiss him through it, saying, “Yes, okay, you stupid—” cutting himself off with a hiss when Jon nudges accidentally against his dick.

Jon is blindingly hard, he’s realizing suddenly, so turned on he can’t think. He shoves Lovett’s shirt up so that he can kiss his chest again, rut against his hip, and presses his face to Lovett’s damp side, kissing him almost up into his armpit.

“You’re being so,” Lovett says, trying—Jon can’t figure out quite what he’s doing—to shuck Jon’s sweatpants off with his knees, with one of his feet. Jon feels like he’s freefalling, and for the first time since the first time, he feels like Lovett’s freefalling too, butting at him, contorting to bite at the underside of Jon’s arm, to rub his face against Jon’s chest, saying, disbelievingly, “I can’t believe you let me—”

“It was good,” Jon says.

“Shut _up_ ,” Lovett says, and shoves him hard onto his back on the bed, pressing a hand to his chest to hold him there. He’s breathing heavily. “I’m gonna do you,” he says, too-careful, eyes flicking continuously up and down Jon’s body, catching on his dick and dilating.

“Okay,” Jon says, “if you—”

“ _If_ I—”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “I buy it, okay?”

“You—what?”

“I buy it.” Lovett’s shifting his hand on Jon’s chest, slight, unbearable friction, hand inching minutely down towards Jon’s cock. “The whole—‘real life is for March, Lemon,’ ‘what happens in Minnesota’ thing we’re doing here,” which isn’t—it _isn’t_ , but—“Just, like,” Lovett says, “a dirty weekend, right?”

“That’s not—”

“I’m gonna suck your cock,” Lovett says abruptly, and Jon can’t say _anything_ anymore. “Do you know how often,” he says, “before I knew you—”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jon says feelingly. He’s so turned on that his eyes keep trying to close against his will, which they _can’t_ ; he’ll stop looking at Lovett when he’s—fucking— _dead_ , that’s when he’ll stop, that’s how good Lovett looks right now, mottled and bitten-up and roll-in-the-hayed, hair sticking up at all angles, shoving Jon further up the bed and palming his abdomen as he crawls between his legs.

“You know those pictures—” he says, voice crazed.

“What?” Jon’s touching his hair. He’s touching Lovett’s hair. Lovett’s breathing hotly on the head of his dick and he’s petting a curl off his forehead. Fuck.

Lovett looks up. He licks his lips. “In, uh,” he says, “like. When you got, uh. Profiled.”

“What,” Jon says again.

“You always looked like you’d have _such_ a good dick,” Lovett says feverishly, “and you _do_ , it’s not fair,” and doesn’t wait for Jon to respond, just bends forward and gets his mouth around it.

Lovett’s better at this than Jon—or at least, he knows what he’s doing, taking Jon halfway to the root at one go, hollowing his cheeks around Jon’s length. His face looks almost—Jon drags his eyes open again, panting—almost unbearably content, like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than swallowing Jon whole. Jon wants (images flashing through his mind one after the other, unstoppable) to hold his jaw steady and fuck his face, see if he can take it, if he likes it; he wants to pet the taut corners of his mouth, tug at his hair, pull him off and watch him gasp and whine and beg for it back. Lovett’s ass is in the air, his hands heavy on Jon’s thighs. He looks, for once, perfectly at home in his body, here in this bed, drooling on Jon’s dick, taking him deeper and deeper like it’s nothing, like it’s the easiest, best thing in the world.

“Lovett,” Jon says helplessly, and touches his cheek. He needs to think about stuff that isn’t—stuff that isn’t this—horrible stuff—nuclear war, being on an airplane as it taxis down the runway, ten-foot-tall spiders—anything that might stop him from coming in five seconds flat, shooting off like a teenager into Lovett’s greedy mouth.

Instead, _corpses maggots roadkill clowns,_ he’s saying, unable to stop himself, “You look so good, Lovett, it’s crazy,” swiping a thumb across Lovett’s cheekbone, listening as Lovett groans, taking Jon so deep he’s almost gagging on it. “So good,” he says again, threading a hand into Lovett’s hair, “I can’t even—what am I gonna do with you?” Lovett hitches a breath. His eyes, which have been closed as he applies himself to the task at hand, flutter open so that he’s looking up at Jon through his dark lashes. “What am I gonna _do_ ,” Jon says. “What are you gonna let me do, what do you like—”

It’s just, Jon thinks dimly, that the whole world is a fucking—a buffet he never knew about before. He’s fucked women up and down and backwards and sideways but he didn’t _know_ that there was also this: the pale curve of Lovett’s ass, soft, begging for Jon to knead it and spank it and bite it and, Jesus, fuck into it; the heaviness of his cock hardening again between his legs, waiting for Jon’s hand, his mouth; and all the things Jon doesn’t know, yet, whether Lovett will like, or love—the things that’ll lay him out.

“What do you want,” he says again, and gets a hand into Lovett’s hair so that he can feel Lovett moving beneath his palm. “I wanna give it to you.” He groans involuntarily as Lovett sucks harder, tongue swirling around the head of Jon’s dick.

It feels so good that it’s hard to think. When he tightens his fingers, Lovett moans, takes him deeper, then pulls off with a wet pop to suck kisses all the way down to the root, rubbing his face against Jon’s spit-slick dick like he’s possessed.

“Fuck,” Lovett says heavily. He kisses the ridge of Jon’s cockhead, sucking once, hard, so that Jon feels it like lightning in every inch of his body, then pulls off again and jacks him, kissing and sucking, sloppy and—artless, Jon thinks, clenching one fist into the sheets. Lovett is practiced—he must have sucked, Jesus, the thought makes Jon feverish with equal parts arousal and misery, plenty of dicks; he knows what he’s _doing_ —but he’s still gripping Jon’s dick tight, sliding the head across his plush lips like he can’t believe he gets to touch it. He’s still looking up at Jon, eyes glazed and wondering, and saying, “Your stupid fucking cock is too—”

“What—”

“Stupid _good_ ,” Lovett says, his pink tongue darting out to lap a pearl of precome off the head, eyes fluttering closed as he swallows.

“Shit,” Jon says again, and then, “What do you _like,_ ahh—” cutting himself off when Lovett just slides back onto him, mouth hot and wet and tight, so achingly sweet that Jon wants to sink into it for a thousand years. Instead, he drags Lovett’s head back, says, “Lovett, fuck, look at me. I wanna do it all, okay?”

“...All is a lot,” Lovett says. His pupils are huge.

“Yeah,” Jon says, “what do you _want_ —”

“Fuck me,” Lovett says, so sudden and garbled that Jon has to say, “What,” even though he _thinks_ —“I want you to fuck me,” Lovett says again. His face is bright red and he sounds like saying it this way—slow, unambiguous—is killing him, which, fine: it’s killing Jon, too.

“You want my dick?” Jon says—incredible, inadequate question. He touches his thumb to the corner of Lovett’s eye. “You want my dick inside you?”

Lovett’s nodding before he’s even finished the question, sucking Jon’s dick back into his mouth and bobbing on it, too fast, too deep, so hyper-focused that he barely seems to notice Jon pulling his hair, frantic, saying, “Shit, shit, shit, Lovett, I’m not gonna last if you—fuck—come on.” He barely manages to tug Lovett off again, keening and gasping, before it gets to be too much, and half drags him up, half wriggles down to him.

“That’s what _I_ said,” Lovett’s saying, “and you didn’t _listen_ —”

“Mmm,” Jon says, but he’s finally groping Lovett’s ass, just as good as he thought it would be, pulling Lovett tight against him and kissing him as he wriggles and whines, sore cock pressed between them. He strokes his hand up into the small of Lovett’s back and then back down again, rubbing a finger between Lovett’s cheeks, listening as Lovett’s breathing gets irregular, as he presses back into the touch. “Good? Do you like—”

“Stop,” Lovett grits out, “asking,” and arches into it as Jon’s finger, exploring, finds the soft heat of his hole and rubs across it once, twice, “ahh—”

“You do,” Jon says, close to Lovett’s ear. “You like it.” He squeezes the swell of Lovett’s ass again.

“Jon—”

“Say it again,” Jon murmurs, and kisses the side of his face, nuzzles at him. His dick is so hard it feels like his whole body is buzzing. “Tell me what you—”

“Put your fucking _finger_ back,” Lovett says.

“Where?”

“Please,” Lovett says. He’s flung a knee across Jon’s hips, braced himself to shove back into Jon’s hand.

“Say it, I wanna hear you say it,” Jon says. He waits until Lovett half-sobs it, his breath damp on Jon’s neck—“I want you to touch my hole—” before shoving Lovett onto the bed, rolling him onto his stomach, hauling him around so that Jon can get a hand on his ass again, rub it up the stretch of his spine, consider what to do next.

Lovett has his head pillowed on his arms. When Jon spreads a hand across his back and presses him down, he hisses. Jon remembers again the way Lovett had come in his mouth barely ten minutes ago; remembers that his dick must be too-sensitive right now, which isn’t gonna stop Jon from doing anything he wants, from making Lovett feel too good to bear.

He gets a hand on each of Lovett’s cheeks, palms them roughly, then slides his thumbs into Lovett’s crack and crouches close so that he can see the red pucker of Lovett’s hole as it’s revealed, can see the way it’s clenching on nothing, clenching like it _wants_ something: something Jon’s gonna give it.

“Like this—?” he says inanely, and then he’s rubbing the pad of his thumb against it again, Lovett jolting beneath the touch.

“Jon, come _on_ ,” Lovett says. His voice is tense, muffled into the space between his forearm and the comforter.

“I like looking,” Jon says, and pets it again, softly, pulling off when Lovett tries to shove back into the sensation.

“Don’t tease me,” Lovett says. He’s burrowed his face more deeply into the crook of his elbow, stilled himself with a huge, obvious effort. His whole body is strained with wanting. “If you’re not gonna do it—”

“I _am_ gonna do it—”

“Then _do it_ ,” Lovett says, all the muscles in his back flexing.

“I’m just,” Jon says, but there’s no way to finish the sentence. There’s no way to say: _I’ll never be here for the first time again. What if we only do this once. What if I only have one chance to make sure you know how much I like it. How much I want to make it good for you._

“You’ve fucked someone before,” Lovett says, clipped, not looking back at Jon, not even trying to see what Jon’s pretty sure is written all over his face. “I know you have. I’m sure you can—”

“That’s not—”

“—extrapolate—”

“I know, I got it,” Jon says. Lovett’s still clenching involuntarily. Jon thinks, all the air going out of him, about how he’s gonna get a finger in there—two, three—how he’s gonna stretch Lovett until he’s gasping and scrabbling for purchase, fucking back onto Jon’s hand—and then he’s gonna work his cock into that tight heat, spear Lovett on his dick, because Lovett wants it, because he’s asking for it—begging for it—

“I have some, uh” Lovett says, voice still tense, “um. In my bag, or if you—in the bathroom, I think—”

“Okay,” Jon says, gentle, but maybe he’s the one who’s possessed—maybe it’s him—because when he thinks about what has to happen before he can fuck Lovett, how loose and wet he’ll have to be, the only thing he wants is—“Okay,” he says again, and bends to press his lips to the fever of Lovett’s needing hole.

Lovett’s response is instantaneous, explosive. “Jon, fuck, _fuck_.” He kicks back, abrupt and involuntary, so that Jon has to pin his ankles, get an arm around his front to haul him back and hold him tight. “ _Jon_ ,” Lovett says again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He’s chanting like his own voice is the only thing tethering him to the bed, and he bucks against Jon’s grip when Jon kisses his rim softly, softly, then tightens his arm and licks in in earnest.

Whatever worries Lovett had about their neighbors hearing nothing from their room, thinking they weren’t happy—he can throw those out the window, now. The sounds he makes as Jon’s tongue fucks into his hole are unearthly: long, wordless sobs. His ass is flexing back against Jon’s face, cock jerking where it’s trapped between his stomach and Jon’s unyielding forearm. Jon digs his fingers into Lovett’s ass cheek, burying his face in the heat and the feeling, sucking and licking and spitting while Lovett convulses, wriggling like he wants to get away and then, the second Jon lets up even a little, groaning with displeasure. All morning, Lovett’s been the one with his head screwed on—all, _are you sure_ , and, _changed your mind_? Now, though, he seems barely capable of speech, his crack slick with spit, hole gaping demandingly, begging for more.

More is what Jon wants to give it. He wants to give Lovett every-fucking-thing he could ever fucking want. He drags the rough of his tongue across Lovett’s rim one more time, kisses up onto his cheek, bites and palms its softness. Then, not asking, not waiting, he fiddles the tip of his finger into Lovett’s loose hole.

It’s amazing: every time Jon thinks Lovett can’t sound wilder or more desperate, he does. The second Jon gets a finger in him, he’s saying “Yes, yes, yeah,” practically choking on his own eagerness. He shoves his ass back so that the gentlest exploration is suddenly in deep, practically up to the knuckle, Lovett taking it like it’s nothing, clenching on the intrusion and saying, already, “More, come on, Jon, fuck, come _on_ ,” when Jon can’t help leaning in to lick around his own finger at the slight stretch of Lovett’s hole.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m gonna,” and slides his finger out, easy, starts in on two.

It’s tighter—it _is_ —Lovett’s ass clutching in a way that makes him feel faint, crazy, at the idea of his cock in there, stretching and stroking in. He works his fingers all the way in, crooks them a little just to try it, then uncrooks them when Lovett says, frantic, “Not yet—” like he might actually—

“Are you gonna come again?” he asks, gentling a hand up Lovett’s back.

“Stop,” Lovett snaps, “for, just—stop for a second—”

They hold still for a long moment. Lovett is breathing raggedly, tension evident in his shoulders. “Can you just,” he says eventually, “ _please_ just put your dick in me.”

Jon’s fingers tighten reflexively up onto his neck. “Are you—”

“If you ask if I’m sure—”

“You kept asking if _I_ was sure—”

“ _Jon—_ ”

“Okay,” Jon says, “Okay, you gotta wait, I gotta find the,” already clambering over Lovett, bare feet hitting the cold floor, crossing the room in a few long strides to rummage through Lovett’s bag until he finds the little bottle Lovett must have meant. “This?” he says, peering at it, practically cross-eyed, rising and turning back towards the bed.

“Don’t look at me,” Lovett says. Jon can’t even see his face—his head is still bowed, hips up, knees splayed.

Don’t _look_ at—“Is this what you, uh. What you use?”

“It’s _lube_ ,” Lovett says. He leverages himself up onto his elbows so that he _is_ looking at Jon, face damp and flushed and furious. “It’s—there’s no reason I _shouldn’t_ have—”

“I didn’t say anything,” Jon says, crossing back towards the bed.

“Turn your _face_ off,” Lovett says. “Just—shut up, just come fuck me and shut up,” eyes squinching closed, so that Jon can’t stop himself, he has to bend awkwardly to kiss him, Lovett’s mouth opening easily under his. After a moment, he bites Jon’s lower lip sharply. “I’m not fucking kidding.”

“For once,” Jon says.

Back on the bed, he swings a leg across Lovett’s hips and fumbles to uncap the lube, over-pouring it onto his fingers so that it spills onto Lovett’s ass, slips down towards his hole. Jon wraps his hand around his dick, fisting it, twisting across the head, until it’s slick and shiny-red. Then he fingers into Lovett’s hole again, too-quick, Lovett groaning and saying, raggedly, “Give me your dick already, Jesus Christ, Jon, it’s not fucking rocket science—”

“Shh,” Jon says, stroking his fingers back out, tugging at Lovett’s rim. “Shh, I’m gonna, I promise.”

It feels unreal to grip himself again and guide his dick to the seam of Lovett’s ass, fuck along its slick heat for a moment, stomach tight with expectant desire. His cockhead catches minutely on Lovett’s grasping rim and stutters past. He’s so close; he’s _so_ close, and Lovett’s so alive under him, lax one second and tense the next, pushing back, begging with his whole body for more, now, “ _please_ —”

“Yeah,” Jon says breathlessly—listens to the sound of Lovett panting and whining, the whisper of the sheets under his shifting knees, the wind outside the window—and nudges, barely breathing, torturously careful, into Lovett’s hole.

He wants to go slow. He wants to go so slow that time stops, or even reverses itself. He wants to be fucking Lovett right now and also five minutes ago, five months ago, five years ago; on his desk in the White House, in the dark bedroom of Lovett’s DC flophouse, in Lovett’s college dorm room—what did Lovett’s dorm room even _look_ like—how could there ever have been a time when he didn’t know Lovett at all? When he didn’t even know that Lovett existed? He wants to have always known him, to have always been fucking him, long, measured strokes, deep and easy and good.

Instead—Lovett’s shoving back on him with a wild groan, ass clenching convulsively around Jon’s cock, tight and slick and hot, and Jon’s collapsing over his back, bracing a hand by Lovett’s head, fucking into him—faster than he wants but he can’t _help_ it, it’s just. Too much, way too much, being inside Lovett, crammed up into him, kissing the dip between Lovett’s shoulder blades while he splits him open.

“More,” Lovett says, and then, when Jon keeps trying to control himself, “Jon, _please_ , harder, please, I need it, I need,” fucking himself back so furiously that the bed is genuinely creaking, so that Jon has no choice but to stroke a hand down his side, press him down, say, “No fucking patience,” and hold him still while he drives in.

He’s fucking Lovett so hard he can feel it in his fingers, and Lovett’s shouting, taking it so well, ass opening on Jon’s dick. Braced against his back, pressing insistently into him, Jon has the feeling that—when he’s covering Lovett like this—nobody else can touch him, nobody else gets to touch him _ever_ , and that makes his hips hitch harder. Every grunt, every gasp Lovett emits hits him like a hammer. He presses his mouth to the back of Lovett’s neck, sucks hard while Lovett writhes on his cock, sucks until, when he pulls back, there’s a pulsing red mark. Lovett smells like sweat and sex, so good, and the only thing that _isn’t_ good is—

“Wanna see your face,” Jon says with effort, slamming into Lovett. Lovett doesn’t say anything. He’s just gasping, ah, _ah_ , limp and sweet beneath Jon, his body pliant with pleasure. “Lovett,” Jon says, mindless, and kisses his neck again, kisses the curve of his shoulder, butts his head against Lovett’s back. “I wanna watch you,” he murmurs, and only gets a response when, with a deep breath, he pulls all the way out, one quick slide.

“Fuck,” Lovett snaps, then, “No, fuck—”

“It’s okay—”

“Jon,” Lovett’s saying, frantic. But Jon’s already flipping him, so fucking _easy_ , getting ahold of his hips to drag him close and nudging at his entrance again, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as he slips right back in, Lovett’s ass grasping at him, swallowing him up. This time, he gets to watch the way Lovett arches up as it happens, chin tipping back, eyes fluttering closed; gets to watch how, once Jon’s inside him, he slumps back onto the bed, just his hips canting into the thrusts, his bitten red mouth slack and open as he takes it.

“Look at me,” Jon says. He doesn’t know where the words are coming from; only that he can’t stop them from bubbling up. He rubs a hand up Lovett’s chest, digs his fingers into the swell of his tits, keeps stroking up Lovett’s neck until he’s touching his face and rubs insistently at his cheek before crooking a finger into his mouth. Lovett doesn’t skip a beat. He just wraps his lips around it, groaning, sucking at it, strangely obedient.  

“Lovett,” Jon says again, “look at me, I need you to—” When Lovett’s eyes stay closed, he strokes his cheek again, then slaps it, lightly, twice—sharp, soft taps—says, low and unthinking, “Honey, please,” and watches hungrily as Lovett starts, cock jerking against his stomach, and opens his eyes like it hurts.

“Can you keep ‘em open?” Jon says. Lovett shakes his head. “You can, you can keep ‘em open for me, come on,” Jon says, and, rubbing a rough hand across his face one last time, reaches down to flex his fingers around Lovett’s dick.

Lovett howls the second Jon gets a grip on him. “Shh,” Jon’s saying, “so good.” He’s losing his mind over the whole thing: Lovett trembling under his touch, his damp face, the way there are the slightest, smallest tear tracks at the corners of his eyes, like Jon’s pushed him places he didn’t mean to go, didn’t think he would. “I wanna see you come for me,” Jon says.

“Fuck,” Lovett says thickly. His dick is jerking in Jon’s hand, his ass clenching as Jon keeps fucking in. For once, all of his layers seem to have been peeled back: there’s something raw and tender about his face, about the way he’s trying, tremblingly, to do what Jon asked, staring glassily up, breath hitching.

“You’re gonna,” Jon says, “okay, if I—”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lovett’s saying, spasmodic. Jon braces forward, all his weight on one arm, and kisses him, once, because he can’t not. When he pulls back, still stroking Lovett’s cock, Lovett looks—he looks—

 _I_ know _you feel it_ , Jon thinks wildly, staring down at Lovett’s face. _I_ know _you feel what I feel_.

Within a second, though, Lovett’s saying, “I’m gonna,” screwing his eyes shut, hiding away again, and shooting up onto his stomach with a cry, his whole body tightening for an endless moment before, with a wrecked sigh, he goes limp, twitching while Jon finishes stroking him off.

Jon’s not gonna last much longer. He can feel himself hitting the edge. He’s fucking into Lovett uncontrollably, arrhythmically, gritting his teeth against the inevitable so that he can have it for just another minute: Lovett’s face, dazed and dreamy, stomach covered in the mess of his own come, the feeling of being so deep inside him that he might disappear in it. After a moment, though, he can’t hold it off—he’s falling forward again, arms trembling next to Lovett’s head, saying, “I’m gonna, Lovett, is it okay,” and Lovett’s saying yeah, yes, desperate and repetitive, tipping his face up so that Jon can kiss him, messy and inartful, as he hits the cliff and comes, pulsing deep inside Lovett’s ass.

Lovett keeps kissing him through it, clenching on his cock as he comes and comes. Jon’s breathing heavily into his mouth. He doesn’t wanna stop. He kisses Lovett until his arms practically buckle, then lets himself collapse on him, resting his face in Lovett’s neck, not pulling out—staying inside him, dick twitching and softening, filling him up for as long as he can.

 

 

“Do you think it’s as fun to fuck in Minnesota in the summertime?” Lovett asks idly.

Jon glances over. Lovett’s flung one leg off the bed; the other is crooked up. His arms are crossed behind his head. Jon can already see all the places on his chest and neck where bites and kisses will darken by tomorrow, and probably won’t disappear for a week. Thinking about Lovett peeling his shirt off in LA, looking into the mirror, seeing proof of what happened halfway across the country—it makes Jon want to roll over and mark him up even more. “It’s the same place,” he says instead.

“Yellow card,” Lovett says. “Pedantry _again_ , and avoiding the question.”

“You don’t even know what a yellow card is,” Jon tells him, and can tell from Lovett’s spooked little look that he’s tipping his hand.

Earlier, after they’d (unbelievable—) fucked, Jon had lain on top of Lovett for a long time—well, it had felt like a long time, anyway—cold air prickling against the sweat on his back, Lovett warm and sweet and full-up beneath him. He’d kept expecting Lovett to shove him off, to say—what’s the kind of thing he _would_ say?— _I have a Charley horse_ , or, _ugh, your stupid muscles are crushing me_. But he hadn’t said anything. He’d rested his cheek on the top of Jon’s head, crooked an arm across his back and stroked a thumb across the skin there, small motion, before stilling again.

When Jon finally did recover himself and pull out, Lovett had made a small, shocked sound. “Sorry,” Jon said, but Lovett just said, “I’m fine,” as Jon rolled off him. Even then, he hadn’t seemed in a hurry to move. He kept lying there, staring up at the ceiling, unreadable look on his face.

Jon’s come had been dripping out of his ass. Jon had wanted to bend close, finger it back into Lovett’s used hole, rub a thumb across that slick pucker. He’d wanted to kiss down Lovett’s thighs, kiss his knees, his shins, kiss all the way down to his toes and then work his way right back up.

Instead, he’d stayed pressed arm to arm with Lovett until he finally stirred, stretched both legs, and sat up.

“Minne _so_ ta,” he said, and then, “ _Really_ dirty weekend,” and then, “Wow,” drawn out, in a voice that gave Jon nothing.

Jon had _seen_ it—he’d wanted to take Lovett by the shoulders, shake him, say, _the way you looked at me_ and _what did you_ mean—but— _let’s take the day off_ , he’d told Lovett that morning. Jesus.

Now, hours later, he binks away the memory. Lovett is swinging his leg a little, heel thumping back onto the bed frame. “I’m just saying, like—if Cap and Almanzo ever did it, it was definitely in a quinzee in a blizzard and not in a dugout in June.”

“Who?” Jon squints. “In a what?” The TV’s off. It had been on for a while, both of them lying in the bed, half-dozing, until Lovett had distracted him, or—he’d distracted Lovett—unclear. Now that they’ve broken the seal, whatever’s between them keeps coming in waves.

“From Little House on the Prairie,” Lovett says. “My references have been impeccably curated to suit our circumstances.”

Jon rolls over so that he’s facing Lovett, hand tucked under his face on the pillow. “You know a lot about Little House on the Prairie,” he says.

“Well,” Lovett tells him, head tilted confidingly in his direction, “I was a very unpopular child.”

Jon stares at him for a long moment, until Lovett starts to squirm. “ _What_?” he asks.

“I think they woulda done it in a dugout,” Jon says, but Lovett just rolls his eyes.

“Almanzo married Laura,” he informs Jon, “and Cap got his head blown off in a boiler explosion before he turned thirty.”

“Jesus, Lovett,” Jon says, grimacing. “That was _not_ in a children’s book.”

Lovett says, “Whatever,” and, drawing his leg abruptly back onto the bed, thumps around onto his side. He leans over to bite one of Jon’s pecs, a little savage.

“ _Hey_ ,” Jon yelps, flinching back on instinct, but then Lovett’s biting again, softer, and sucking gently at the mark his teeth made, and even though Jon’s murmuring, “You didn’t even explain about the quintee,” Lovett just corrects him, “Quinzee,” and moves his mouth to worry Jon’s nipple, and—what’s Jon supposed to do? What’s he even supposed to do?

The thing is, Jon thinks after they’ve gone again, when Lovett’s passed out and the room is still and time is slow and forgiving, he can imagine it too easily: the flung-wide windows, the sound of cicadas in the dull midday heat, the oppressive weight of the humid air making everything feel like a long, sick sink, but somehow, inside all of that, the redemptive joy of pressing into Lovett, or Lovett pressing into him, sweaty, damp, sweet, rocking against each other, lethargic, feeling it like a whole-body hum, almost too hot to be touching but touching anyway. He’d fuck Lovett in the summertime. He’d fuck Lovett in spring and fall, too; in Minnesota or in LA or in New York, or on any number of deserted beaches, or occupied beaches; by a lake or on a mountain or in his own bedroom, or Lovett’s bedroom, or some bedroom belonging to the two of them together. He’d fuck Lovett in private, in public, any which way from Sunday, he’d fuck Lovett in a quinzee (mental note to Google that) or in a dugout or in the immense openness of a tallgrass prairie, down among the garter snakes and the mongeese. _Do you like green eggs and ham?_ Yes, Jon thinks, twitching thoughtlessly against Lovett’s thigh, arm flung across Lovett’s chest, fucking _duh_.

Lovett snores. The wind howls. For a little while, dreaming restless dreams, Jon sleeps.

 

 

In the late afternoon, they eat all the leftover pizza crusts from the night before, sitting in front of the fire. Jon nudges his foot on top of Lovett’s and watches as Lovett wriggles, casting him a sidelong glance, but doesn’t move away. “How many times do you think you can do it in a day?” Jon asks, nudging his big toe against Lovett’s.

“Who wants to know,” Lovett says through a mouthful of crust.

“Interested parties,” Jon says blandly, and then, “Wanna take a shower?”

“We are _not_ having sex in that bathtub,” Lovett says, narrowing his eyes. Jon grins.

They have sex in the tub. Jon jerks Lovett off, a little inexpertly, first, from the front, but then he hauls Lovett around—“If I fall and die in here—!” and presses up against his back and that goes better, jacking Lovett’s dick like it’s his own, rutting brainlessly against his ass, and _then_ —after Lovett’s come all over his own stomach, curling in on himself while Jon sucks marks onto the slick skin of his shoulder—Lovett blows him again and sticks a finger up his ass, which—

“I refuse to believe no one’s _ever_ ,” Lovett says after Jon comes so hard he almost _does_ wipe out on the slick porcelain.

“Why would I _lie_ about this,” Jon says.

“Why does anyone do anything?” Lovett asks. He’s looking a little wild around the eyes, pushing his hair back with one hand, so that Jon has no choice but to reach out and mess it up again. “Why are we fucking in a snowstorm in Minnesota? There _are_ no stranger things anymore. I hope you understand, by the way, that I _won’t_ be coming again today.”

“Mmm,” Jon says. Lovett’s eyelashes are thick and clumpy, water running down his face. Jon tugs him close, kisses his neck, slides his hands around to grope idly at his ass.

“ _Won’t,”_ Lovett insists, voice catching.

“You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” Jon tells him, and keeps kissing him in the shower until they’re both pruney and overheated. Lovett stays soft and curiously compliant as the water finally goes lukewarm, until Jon has no choice but to turn the taps and wrap a towel awkwardly around his back, herding him all the way back to the bed, where they scramble to curl up under the covers, damp heads on the pillow, cupping each other’s faces and kissing shallowly, slowly—no sense, whatever Jon might have said, of it going anywhere. Lovett’s barely half-hard when Jon reaches down to grope him. He isn’t even trying to make it otherwise—it’s nice to feel Lovett’s dick try gamely to fatten up in his hand, but it’s nice, too, just to cup it, to hear Lovett whine and squirm in sore protest, his damp, bare body entwined with Jon’s against the cool sheets.

“Listen much?” Lovett says. He’s touching Jon like he’s not sure he’s allowed, hands sweeping Jon’s sides, light enough that he could snatch them back at a second’s notice.

“To you?” Jon says. “Given the sheer volume of output—”

“Hey,” Lovett says, and then, “ _Hey_ ,” when Jon presses a conciliatory kiss to his earlobe. Lovett shudders at the touch, which is so nice that Jon can’t help himself. He kisses it again,  then sucks it into his mouth, refusing to let up when Lovett shies away. “You’re insatiable,” Lovett says when Jon finally pulls back. He’s strangely hushed, mouth crooked at one corner. “What do women _do_ with you when you get like this? I guess they can come more often than me, so—match made in heaven—”

Jon doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. He hmms instead of saying anything. He doesn’t wanna talk about women, about anyone he fucked before, a world away—he wants—he’s not supposed to _say_ it right now, but he wants—

“Or I guess they can leave,” Lovett’s saying, still quiet, tone gently mocking. “Or _you_ can leave. If you’re usually like this. Are you usually like this?”

“I’m not,” Jon says. Then, _fuck it_ , “Lovett—”

“Well, jury’s out,” Lovett says, expression closing off. “Provide some references, then we can talk.” He nudges at Jon with one knee until Jon, pulse unsteady, lets him go. Then he rolls onto his back, sits up in the bed and reaches onto the nightstand for his phone. “Bets on who’s been fired since yesterday?” he says, voice perfectly even, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening here, which—maybe to Lovett it _isn’t_ , Jon thinks, sliding his suddenly unoccupied hand under his cheek and watching Lovett as he swipes through his lock screen.

When Lovett’s sitting like this, cross-legged and hunched forward, the slight, soft curve of his stomach is apparent. So is the strange broadness of his back and shoulders, oxymoronic when he really is small; small enough that Jon could tuck him under his arm, which he wants, and which Lovett—maybe—doesn’t.

“Lovett,” he says again, anyway.

“Come on,” Lovett says, as if he can’t hear. “Pony up a name, I wanna take your money.”

“When we get back to LA—”

“Clock is ticking,” Lovett says. He glances over. “The app is opening, Jon, and the window is closing. Soon your opportunity to enter into a friendly wager with me will be gone, and neither of us will have profited, so—”

“Can you please,” Jon says, “listen to me.”

Lovett doesn’t say anything for a moment. He looks back at his phone, but doesn’t touch the screen. “You said,” he says finally, measured, frowning down at his thumbs, “that we didn’t have to talk about it.”

“...We don’t,” Jon says. “Have to. But if—”

“Okay then—”

“—you want—”

“I don’t—”

“We just work together,” Jon says, “so.”

Lovett does look up at that. He shifts to stare down at Jon, blank-faced, then smiles lopsidedly. “You know,” he says, tone absolutely unobjectionable, “keep putting it that way, you could give a guy a complex.”

“What if we kept doing it,” Jon says abruptly. He knows before he even finishes the sentence how things are gonna go. Lovett shakes his head, grimacing, and scratches distractedly at the underside of his knee.

“That’s not a good idea,” he says, no wiggle room in his tone. “You _know_ that’s not a good idea.”

“Why?” One thing Jon could do: drop it. Things that feel more likely at this moment: that he might burst into flames, or start humiliatingly to cry, or escalate the situation about ten notches beyond the level they’re at right now—say something that starts with _I want_ or _we could_ or _do you_ —the kind of thing he’s pretty sure you don’t blurt out to someone who won’t stop using the phrase ‘dirty weekend,’ and who’s just said _no_ to anything else.

“Why?” Lovett repeats. “For, like— _every_ reason.”

“Okay,” Jon says, “but it was good—”

“Burritos are good,” Lovett says. He clenches his hands into fists, then relaxes them. “A Democratic Congress in 2018—that would be good. Viral videos of puppies and baby seals being friends, good, Mitch McConnell choking to death on a pretzel, good. You and me still being friends in five years because we didn’t fuck it up by trying to take a weird weekend and make it real life—really, really good. Okay?” Lovett takes a deep breath. “You know how to do this,” he says after a long moment. “I know you know, you’ve done it a million times, can you just—”

It’s true; Jon’s had plenty of casual sex— _“Showboat,”_ he snipes at himself in Lovett’s voice—but the fact is, it mostly wasn’t with friends, and it definitely wasn’t with best friends, and it _definitely_ wasn’t with anybody as absolutely inextricable from the fabric of his life as Lovett.

“Okay, not a million,” he says.

“This is fun,” Lovett says. “I’m having fun. Okay? So let’s just keep it—not complicated. Okay?”

The thing about Lovett is: sometimes it’s hard to tell, when he talks, whether he believes what he’s saying; or whether he believes that _you_ believe what he’s saying; or whether he’s even listening to himself at all.

“Yeah,” Jon says, “okay.”

“Okay,” Lovett says, and sighs, bending over his phone again. “And _guess_ already,” he says. “Geez, what does a guy have to do to win a twenty around here.”

“Gotta go Spicer,” Jon says tiredly.

Lovett grunts noncommittally. “I’m in for Tillerson,” he says, and opens the app, bends in, elbows braced on his knees, to peer at the screen.

_Yeah. Okay._

Lovett’s always telling Jon to call a spade a spade. “Stop talking around it,” he says when Jon approaches a topic too delicately. “Fewer flourishes,” he marks on the side of Jon’s purpler speeches. “Get to the meat of the matter. DO NOT DISSEMBLE.” (“Thanks, Lovett,” Jon has said, dryly, on more than one occasion, before going home and sitting with the question of what he _actually_ wants to say, which it feels, sometimes, like only Lovett can make him ask.)

But Lovett lies to himself. Jon knows that to be true. Lovett tells himself some things based on the world as he believes it to be and not the world as it is. He’s not some paragon of clear-headedness, no matter how aggressively he asserts his brand. Sometimes he shoots straight and sometimes he shoots himself straight in the foot and grits his teeth and says he feels fine, why are you asking, he feels completely fucking fine, so—

So what, Jon thinks, and rolls onto his back. So what? If Lovett says he doesn’t want anything—if Lovett says this is all he wants…

You can feel certain that somebody’s locking you out, but you can’t make them give you the key. You can’t make them let you in.

Even knowing that, though, he can’t stop seeing it: Lovett’s face as Jon fucked into him, the way he’d looked up at Jon like he was everything, like it was everything, like he didn’t want it ever to end.

“No one,” Lovett says. “Ugh. If you can’t even count on this—”

“Uh-huh,” Jon says, and keeps staring at the ceiling, not moving, wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do now.

He keeps wondering, too—all the rest of the evening, into the night, even after Lovett’s finished his book, tossed it onto the floor, passed out in the bed next to him. The room is cold, but it’s not unpleasant, especially with Lovett plastered to Jon’s side, his face turned into Jon’s neck, breathing deep and even. He snuffles and twitches a little in his sleep, as if having a strange dream. Jon moves his hand up to cup the back of his head, stroking his hair, scritching a little at his scalp, and he settles. Lovett’s asleep; he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he nuzzles into Jon’s neck and it feels like a kiss. Like a yes.

It stopped storming hours ago, but the sky is finally, finally clear, for the first time in days. Jon can see it from across the room; cloudless, thin sliver of moon barely casting a glow, a few strong stars cutting through the light of human habitation. It’s startling how quickly a person can get used to anything: snow, or being scared, or having someone to touch when the fear wells up. When Jon lived in DC, he leaned on no one. Now, he leans on Lovett.

And tomorrow…

Tomorrow there won't be snow; tomorrow the flights won't be grounded; tomorrow they'll go back to LA, where you literally couldn't get snowed in if you tried, not if you prayed or bled a sacrificial goat or paid someone to seed the clouds. Back to LA where they'll have to figure out what's real and what to do.

Jon feels, suddenly, shaky with want that won’t be named. He shifts under Lovett’s arm, turns onto his side, noses at Lovett’s face like an animal, kissing his cheek, the underside of his chin, nipping at his lower lip until Lovett full-body startles and squints one eye open in bleary incomprehension.

“Wha—” he says, raising a hand to grip Jon’s arm. “What time is it?” he asks, and yawns.

Jon squirms closer to him on the bed, until their legs are tangled, chests pressed together. “I don’t know.” He bends to suck at Lovett’s Adam’s apple, swallowing the vibrations, dick stiffening at Lovett’s shocked intake of breath. He lets his hand slip down Lovett’s side and into his underwear, squeezing his ass, tugging Lovett closer.

Then Lovett’s hand is on his chin, tipping it up. He looks tired, but more alert by the moment, his eyes bright on Jon’s face. “ _God_ ,” he says in response to whatever he sees there. “You want it again?”

“Yeah,” Jon says, and Lovett says, “You want it again,” not quite a question, hand flexing against Jon’s face, thumb stroking his cheek, “you want it _again_ ,” finally, finally pressing forward to kiss Jon, a little sweet and then, in a moment, deep and filthy, thorough and promising. When he draws back, he says: “You can’t get enough of me.” It oughta be a joke, but it comes out faintly wondering.

“Lovett,” Jon says, “can you just—”

“Hey,” Lovett says, “ _you_ woke _me_ up,” but he pushes Jon onto his back and straddles him in one quick motion. The covers have fallen back; Jon really is cold now, nipples pebbling, goosebumps prickling up his arms, but his hands are on Lovett’s thighs, he’s looking up at Lovett’s face—it’s like the best dream he’s ever had.

“You want me to take care of you?” Lovett says. He smirks, a making-fun twist at the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Jon says, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to know what Lovett makes of it.

“Alright.” Lovett’s voice comes through the darkness, and then Jon’s falling. Lovett’s falling with him. They fall together for a long, long time.

 

 

“Do you think if I paid Tommy, he’d come to my house every morning and make breakfast for me?” Lovett asks, mouth full of French toast, actively spearing a sausage on his fork.

The dining room is practically empty, sun barely up, but the fire is blazing and all the tables are set, cloths crisp and white, silverware gleaming. Jon pours a little cream into his steaming coffee and glances across the table at Lovett. “I think if you paid Tommy a million dollars,” he says, “he’d _maybe_ come to your house every morning and pelt you with donuts till you woke up.”

“Kinky,” Lovett says indistinctly.

“You have a warped mind,” Jon tells him, and steals a bite off his plate.

He and Lovett had gone to bed—gone to _sleep_ —so early that they were both up before seven, listening as salt trucks and snow ploughs rumbled past their window, clearing the streets, making the world real again and traversable. Lovett had gotten up quickly instead of staying under the warm covers with Jon’s arms around him. He’s the one who’s spent the past few days staying up-to-date on their travel situation, puzzling out their path home, and according to him, they’re practically guaranteed a flight out by the early evening. “And if we’re not on a plane by then—”

“Not this again,” Jon had said, reluctantly climbing out of bed as well.

“—we _will_ sue,” Lovett had said. “I _won’t_ be stopped.”

“Shocking,” Jon told him, watching as he twitched the curtain aside and peered out at the pale light of the clear sky along the horizon.

Instead, though, less than ten minutes into breakfast, Jon still sipping his first cup of coffee and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Lovett’s phone pings with an alert. Lovett’s talking as he swipes through to check it—“Far be it from me to tell Tommy he can’t jack his Jared Kushner rage boner—whatever you gotta do to get by in Trump’s America—” but he stops pretty quick the second he starts reading, brow creased.

“What?” Jon says, and then, “Lovett, what?” when Lovett just keeps scanning his screen, face impassive. “Come on—”

“Eat your breakfast,” Lovett says. He sets his phone down and downs the rest of his coffee in one gulp. “We got a flight.”

“At—”

“Couple hours,” Lovett says. He’s peering into his empty cup, lashes lowered, so that Jon can’t get a good look at his face.

“A couple—okay,” Jon says. He sets his own cup down so clumsily that coffee splashes onto the saucer. The few sips he’s had seem to sour in his stomach. How had he been thinking this day would go? What had he imagined? He’d thought—dumb—that he still had time, that he and Lovett would spend the morning in bed, pack up and leave by noon or one, hours from now—that they’d hang out at the airport all afternoon—the kind of long wait-and-see that ought by rights be aggravating, but with Lovett—with Lovett right now—it could have been nice, Jon thinks. He blinks, turning to glance out the window, where the sun’s fully beaming through the thick glass now, rising quickly. It’s so bright that it’s hard, even when he turns back, to look at his plate or his shiny fork and knife and spoon, because they all seem to be looking back.

Across from him, Lovett jerks into motion. He spins his cup round in its saucer, watching it do a quarter-turn and teeter to a stop. Then, pushing his half-empty plate away, he says, “I’m gonna go pack.”

“You have time to finish,” Jon says, but Lovett just shakes his head sharply, scrubbing a hand across the back of his neck. He looks like his skin is too tight all of a sudden.

“Nah,” he says, “I’m done. It’s fine. We should leave ASAP.”

“Yeah, okay, I can—” Jon says, starting to push his own chair back from the table.

Lovett’s voice is startlingly loud in the empty dining room. “Don’t,” he says. Then, half-laughing, “You should finish, you gotta feed those, uh.” He gestures vaguely at Jon’s arms. “It’s fine. Just meet me up there.”

“Sure,” Jon says, for lack of anything better to say, and shoves a blueberry across his plate with one finger as he watches Lovett slope across the room and disappear up the stairs.

He should have been ready. He should have woken up ready. He shouldn’t be feeling robbed now, feeling like he was owed more than he’s getting.

It’s just—he eats his pancakes, tasting nothing, staring at his own reflection in the silver sugar bowl—that flying back to LA now feels flat and pointless. They’d meant to make it to New York and they never did. Instead, they’re returning on the underside of a Möbius trip—they might just as well just have stayed home in the first place.

Of course, if they’d stayed home, Jon wouldn’t know stuff like: what Lovett looks like on his hands and knees, face pressed against the mattress, fucking back onto Jon’s dick like it’s the only thing he needs to stay alive. Or how he sounds, begging Jon to make him come, and how he sounds, too, when he tips over the edge, face screwed up, groaning, stripping his cock and spurting uncontrollably across his own chest. Jon wouldn’t know what Lovett’s come tastes like, wouldn’t know what it’s like to bite the thick curve of his calf, his ass, his bicep. He wouldn’t know what it’s like to wake up in Lovett’s arms and kiss him, half asleep, and have him kiss back.

 _A little learning is a dangerous thing_. Jon doesn’t wanna un-know any of this stuff, but he’s not sure what it’s going to turn into when they step outside, into the car, once they’re heading home. Feast today may mean famine tomorrow. No, _will_ mean—that was the deal, right? This is why humans invented the what-happens-in hook-up in the first place: because some things, you’re only supposed to get a taste of, only permitted a measure of. Some things aren’t a good idea all the time. Some things (like dating your best friend and business partner) might not make sense in the real world (back at home, in their neighboring houses, with their easy routines). Probably _don’t_ make sense.

Fuck.

Eventually, Jon gives up on finishing his breakfast and follows Lovett upstairs. He’s expecting to find Lovett fully packed, all his stuff crammed into his backpack, some of Jon’s along with it, sitting on the bed and tapping his wrist like, chop chop, like, time’s a-wasting, like, get me back to my real life already.

Instead, when he comes into the room, Lovett’s still crouched by his bag, not evidently doing much of anything. His damp clothes are still hanging in the flung-open wardrobe. His headphones are still balanced on the dog bust’s ears on one of the side tables near the fireplace.

“My phone isn’t even charged,” Lovett says when he hears the door. His shoulders are hunched up, and the back of his neck looks soft and vulnerable. “If someone’s done my crossword on the plane, you have to give me yours, okay? And your Sudoku. You’re better at being bored than me, so—”

“Lovett,” Jon interrupts, “just—shut up for half a second, okay?”

“You’ve listened to me talk for four days straight,” Lovett says. “I don’t see why you should get a reprieve now.”

“Maybe _because_ I’ve listened to you talk for four days straight?” Jon says, smiling in spite of himself.

“No, exactly.” Lovett hasn’t turned around, and he doesn’t look like he’s planning on it, either; he’s fiddling with something in front of him, head bent in apparent concentration. “If I stopped yammering _now_ , you wouldn’t have anything to look forward to.”

“Lovett,” Jon says. He’s crossing the room almost without meaning to. If he’s in a room with Lovett, he thinks wryly, he _always_ wants to be as near him as possible—his body says _yes_ even when his brain says _bad idea_.

“I’m doing you a favor,” Lovett says. “When you walk into your house in LA and put your bags down in the entryway—no—you’re actually gonna carry them right upstairs, aren’t you?—freak—either way— _wow_ , you’re gonna think, _it is_ quiet _. I_ missed _quiet_ —”

“Lo,” Jon says, and touches the back of his neck with two fingers.

Lovett shuts up. It’s unreal how quickly he shuts up. He doesn’t move at all until Jon curls his fingers and scratches lightly at the red mark he’d left there yesterday. Then he tips his head back jerkily, shifts on his heels, and turns to look up at Jon. He’s put his glasses on and there’s a glare on the lenses. When he opens his mouth like he might have found something to say after all, Jon feels his stomach flip, and slides his fingers around to twist them into the collar of Lovett’s t-shirt, right at the hollow of his throat.

“—yeah?” Lovett says after a moment. He’s raising his eyebrows like _what’s with you?_ as if Jon will notice that and not the way he’s swallowing heavily, too, or the way his eyes go wide and dark.

Something inside Jon constricts and snaps. He’s tightening his fingers before he can even think, dragging Lovett up towards him and, too impatient to wait, bending down at the same time to kiss him so that neither of them is steady on his feet. Lovett says, “Jon, what,” as they stumble back, and then groans when Jon doesn’t stop, pressing into it, mouth opening easily under Jon’s, hand shocking up to flex convulsively against the back of Jon’s neck.

“I’m gonna break an ankle,” Lovett says breathlessly, drawing back, _mmmph_ ing when Jon kisses him again, and then, “or a hip— _Jon_ —”

“You’re only thirty-five,” Jon says. But he gets an arm around Lovett, spreads his fingers flat across the span of his back, and bears them both to the floor, only a little undignified, already wrenching at Lovett’s sweatpants. He manages to shove them down as far as Lovett’s knees before giving up and moving on to his shirt.

“I can’t _move_ ,” Lovett says.

“Okay,” Jon says brainlessly, and tugs at Lovett’s tee until it’s over his head, which is all he needs, the only thing he needs, because Lovett’s bare before him, pale against the dark of the floor and the rug, and squirming, saying, “Cold, cold, _cold_ , I’m _cold_ —”

“Okay, so?” Jon says, and bends to kiss Lovett’s sweet pink nipples and the dip of his belly button, both sides of his stomach, the soft little juts of both hips, which are never gonna break on Jon’s watch. He kisses the tip of Lovett’s dick, already fat and firm, and watches as it twitches, begging for more. “My _back_ ,” Lovett says, “is _cold,_ and my arms—finish taking my shirt off—”

“You do it,” Jon says, and leans across Lovett for his bag, catching one strap and dragging it close, dumping it out, looking for—

“I just _packed_ that—”

“You barely packed anything,” Jon says, scrabbling around until he finds the lube, “I have no idea what the fuck you were doing up here—”

“It was like five _minutes—”_

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Jon chants, shucking his own sweatpants off, frantic, bending to kiss Lovett again while he slicks his fingers up. “Okay?”

“Just let me get my—Jon—God, God, can you just—” Lovett’s managed to free his arms, and he’s shoving a hand up under Jon’s shirt, hissing when Jon slaps him off and sheds it one-handed.

“I can’t just,” Jon says frankly, and gets a finger right into Lovett, who groans, still scrabbling to kick his sweatpants off, so that after a minute Jon has to help him with one hand, fingering him with the other, just so that, when Lovett’s feet are free, he can press his knees up, let Jon finger him in earnest.

Lovett’s swearing in a long steady stream. He looks so good that Jon wants to eat him alive. Instead, after barely a minute, he’s saying, “Enough?” and almost losing it when Lovett says, half-crazed, “You could have shoved it right in you stupid fucking—”

 _Okay, okay, okay,_ Jon thinks, gets ahold of his dick, guides it to Lovett’s entrance, and fucks in, pull-no-punches, one smooth, hard stroke. Lovett makes a noise like he’s been socked in the stomach. He grabs at Jon’s bicep, digging his fingers into the muscle, saying, “Come on, give it to me,” and Jon—it’s the best feeling in the whole fucking world—trusts Lovett so _much_ —

“I’ve got you,” he says, and braces a hand on the hard floor, and does.

Jon fucks Lovett so hard he’s pretty sure _he’s_ gonna be the one feeling it for a week, one knee on the rug, one on the slick floor, both sore within seconds. Lovett’s losing it, gasping, “Jesus Christ, Jon,” and scrabbling at Jon’s back, locking his ankles and riding up into it.

Jon can tell that he’s gonna leave scratches. _Good_ , he thinks, and presses into Lovett, biting the tense line of his throat, the joint of his shoulder, burrowing his face into Lovett’s neck and fucking him deep and slow.

“Is it good,” he says, breathless, against Lovett’s skin, and Lovett says, “Fucking—” and scrabbles at Jon until he raises his head, then kisses him, deep and filthy.

“Don’t fucking stop,” Lovett says, then groans when Jon pistons his hips harder. “You are such a _showoff_.”

“Pot—” Jon says, “kettle—”

“Banter _later_ ,” Lovett says, digging his heels into the small of Jon’s back, driving him forward again and again.  

“Not gonna last,” Jon says. He can feel his eyes screwing shut already against his will, whole body bracing, stomach tight.

“Yeah,” Lovett says, voice rough. He tightens his legs again. “Come on, you’re gonna give it to me.”

“Lovett,” Jon says. He feels helpless and crazy and can’t-get-enough—too fucking wild even to get a hand on Lovett’s cock where it’s slapping against his stomach with each thrust.

“Come on,” Lovett says. “Come _on_ , you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna come in me—” _fuck_ —“I want you to come in me, I want your come in me, Jon, come on,” and that’s just—it—he’s shooting off inside Lovett, fucking his own come hard into Lovett’s tight, grasping hole, fucking him until it hurts to still be in there, way too much feeling, but Lovett’s tense and on edge and Jon doesn’t wanna pull out until he—“Are you gonna—”

“Yeah,” Lovett gasps, and Jon grits his teeth, gets a hand around him, says, “Come on, do it,” watching greedily as Lovett bangs his head back with a cry and goes off, too, dick pulsing onto his tightened stomach until his whole body slackens and Jon has to pull out, too quick, breathlessly oversensitive.

“Your knees,” Lovett says faintly after a minute.

“You really are ready to be ninety already,” Jon says tiredly, lying next to him on the floor, and closes his eyes, putting off the end for another minute more.

 

 

Lovett says they have to “go already,” then says he has to shower, then says, “We don’t have _time_ ,” neck flushed and looking at Jon, then _not_ looking at Jon, then looking at Jon again, until Jon says, “Christ, Lovett, just do it or don’t,” and sighs to himself when Lovett says, lightning-quick, “Pack my bag for me,” and disappears into the bathroom, banging the door shut behind him.

He does it. It isn’t hard. He starts putting things away pretty indiscriminately, shoving clothes into whichever bag is nearest. They live across the street from each other; it isn’t a national emergency if he has to wash Lovett’s t-shirt or get his sweater dry-cleaned. After a minute, though, slowing, he goes back and re-empties the bags—sorts things into two piles—packs them neatly, his things and Lovett’s, carefully separate.

Even then, it only takes a couple minutes to clear the wardrobe and the floor. He plugs Lovett’s phone in—five minutes charge is better than nothing, he figures. He straightens the bedspread, then makes himself stop. It’s not like the bed isn’t gonna get stripped, everything laundered, the second they leave anyway. Everything in this room will be cleaned when they’re gone. The floors will be vacuumed; the nightstands and side tables will be dusted; the bathroom will be scrubbed, mirror polished, half-empty shampoo and conditioner replaced. In a couple of hours, there’ll be no sign that he and Lovett were ever here at all.

The guestbook Lovett had found is still sitting on the bedside table. Jon carries it across to the desk and opens it, idly tracing his fingers through the entries of all the people who’d been here before, enjoyed their stays, fucked in the heavy bed, kissed by the window.

There’s a pen in one drawer of the desk. Jon uncaps it and fiddles it between his knuckles, staring out the window at the wavy world beyond.

 _Jon and Jon,_ he writes finally, slowly, in the Guest Names column. Then, under Notes, failing for words: _We were here._

The bathroom door opens a second later. Jon jerks his head to glance across the room as Lovett emerges, still tugging his jeans onto his hips, saying, “I’m here, let’s go, did you pack? Let’s go.”

“Yeah, your majesty,” Jon says, “I packed,” and watches as Lovett’s eyes catch on the open guestbook.

“Ooh,” he says, zipping and buttoning as he crosses the room. “What’d you write?”

“Just,” Jon says, and then, shrugging, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re supposed to say in these things.”

“Interesting,” Lovett says, “because I read you about a billion of ‘em the other night.” He’s standing close to Jon, hair damp, a warm, live presence. Jon wants to drop a kiss onto the top of his head. He doesn’t. “I like how everybody thinks you were good at your job.”

“I _was_ good at my job,” Jon knee-jerks, but Lovett just twitches a shoulder and bends to read what Jon inscribed.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even stiffen—he keeps tapping the desk next to the thin volume, jiggling one foot against the ground. But he looks at the page for a long moment, long enough to make Jon feel self-conscious, before saying, abruptly, “Okay, boring.” He snatches the pen out of Jon’s hands, stooping to add something and bracing an arm to hide his scribbling. “No peeking.”

“Oh god,” Jon says preemptively.

“Tone,” Lovett says, finishing his addition with a flourish and pulling his arm away. He shifts so that Jon can bend in to squint at Lovett’s exuberant scrawl: _AND did it six ways from Sunday, incl. a couple kinds you can go to jail for in Kansas. AMA_

“You can’t leave that in the guestbook,” Jon says helplessly.

“Watch me,” Lovett says, re-capping the pen and tossing it across the desk. He raps his knuckles on the book and retreats to the bed to rummage through his bag, pulling out a pair of socks. He stoops to slip them on and shove his feet into his sneakers.

“If someone stays in this room,” Jon says, not moving to scribble it out, “and realizes that it was—”

“Who? Who’s sleuthing out our guestbook entry? Did Fox News hire the Hardy Boys and I missed the presser?”

“I’m just saying,” Jon says, closing the book anyway, pressing a hand to its leather cover. He turns to look at Lovett, now bent over his backpack.

Lovett glances up. “Yeah,” he says, then rolls his eyes. “Well, tell you what: they nail us for this one, I’ll take the fall. Okay,” zipping his bag up and turning his attention to his phone. “Ready?”

Jon doesn’t feel ready. Jon feels the furthest thing from ready. But Lovett doesn’t wait for an answer—just swipes a few times, then says, “The Lyft’s en route,” dimming his screen and looking up expectantly.

Jon’s dressed. He’s packed. His boots are waiting by the door. He glances around the room, not expecting his eyes to catch on anything, but on one of the side tables—

“Hey,” he says, crossing to pick it up. “I forgot your souvenir.”

Up close, the dog bust has a gentle, tired expression. There’s a chip in the glass of its monocle.

Lovett glances up from his backpack. “Eh,” he says, “I’m leaving it here.”

“...You can’t leave it here,” Jon tells him.

Lovett looks weirdly disengaged. He swings his bag onto his back. “Why not?” he asks.

“Because—it’s _weird_ ,” Jon says. “But you bought it. And it’s yours.”

“Well, now it’s the Old Victorian Mansion’s,” Lovett shrugs, “and they can leave it in here or put it in the lost and found or sell it back to some thrift store for pin money, I don’t care.”

Jon should probably just drop it, but—“Lovett,” he says, “you can’t just leave Karl Rove sitting on the desk for that poor receptionist to find.”

“He’s not _named_ Karl Rove,” Lovett says. “He just _looks_ like him.”

“What does that _mean_?”

“It just means I didn’t name him, it’s not that hard—”

Lovett’s phone dings.

“I’m going downstairs,” he says. “You can stay here and exchange tearful goodbyes if you want.”

“ _You’re_ the one who called him Karl Rove in the first place!” Jon snaps at Lovett’s retreating back.

But in fact, what Jon does after Lovett’s left, the door banging closed behind him, is pick up the dog and hold it for a minute, feeling its weird, solid weight in his hand, examining its delicate painted-on whiskers, its curmudgeonly brow, the droop of its ears, his mind somewhere else, very far away. After a minute of this contemplation, he crams the thing resignedly into his own bag. Whatever happened here, there was no one to see it and know it—no one but Jon, and Lovett, and— _this._ Like Hell is Jon leaving his only witness in Minnesota, for any idiot to buy and display on a shelf, where it’ll sit for years, collecting dust, full of Jon’s memories.

Lovett’s loitering by the front door when Jon comes downstairs. “Finally,” he says. “I thought maybe you and the dog—” He raises an eyebrow salaciously.

“What is _wrong_ with you,” Jon says.

Something passes across Lovett’s face. He shrugs and shifts his backpack. “I don’t know what you’re into. Well—” turning—“I know a little bit about what you’re into. But what happens in Minnesota—”

“Lovett—”

“My lips are sealed.”

“I know,” Jon says, harsher than he means to. He zips his coat up just for something to do and says, voice still rougher than he wishes it were, “Ready?” Lovett, he realizes, has thrown on the stupid fucking lost and found scarf. Today, the huge, looping ruffs just make him look small, unbearably touchable.

“Yeah,” Lovett says. He rolls his eyes when Jon opens the door and holds it for him, but he walks through it anyway, stomping his feet as the cold hits him.

Jon’s already stepping out onto the porch behind him when Lovett pauses and turns. Behind him, the front walkway is scraped clean and visibly salted. There’s a car idling on the road at its end. “Hey—don’t worry about it, okay?” Lovett says.

“About what?”

“About—any of it.” When Jon doesn’t respond, he shrugs, shifts back onto his heels, and gestures at the white-clad world around them. “The snow made you crazy, right?” he says. “Come on, let’s get in the car, I can’t believe I’m the one trying to keep us on track right now. Do your job.”

“Eh.” Jon tries to smile; it feels stretched and unnatural. “You’re doing okay. Why don’t you be in charge for awhile,” he says, and steps onto the porch, and breaks the spell.

 

 

There’s someone seated between Jon and Lovett on the flight, which is—exactly what _would_ happen right now, Jon thinks, a little lost, as he trails Lovett down the jetway and onto the plane. Lovett’s been quiet since they left the B &B—not silent, but muted, offering half-observations on the length of the line as they passed through security, disappearing for twenty minutes to get a coffee while Jon waited at the gate. “Oh,” he’d said upon returning, almost startled—“I should have—did you want something?”

"I'm good," Jon had said.

Four days ago, he thinks, Lovett would have been producing a stream of nonstop chatter— _had_ been producing a stream of nonstop chatter—on their fellow passengers, his Twitter feed, his brand. Four days they would have been talking and Jon would have been laughing.

Today, they'd just sat at the gate side by side, elbows carefully tucked into their own bodies, scrolling through their phones, until the stewardess started boarding Group 2. And now, he's a step and a half behind Lovett as they walk, instead of at his side; and now, no matter how much he might want to reach out a hand, touch the back of Lovett’s neck, stroke it once, twice, as if to say, I’m still me—I’m still here—he can’t.

Lovett precedes him onto the plane. When they make it to their row, a thin, space-faced guy still wearing his puffy winter coat is already sitting in the middle seat. Lovett is supposed to sit on the aisle, but when the guy gets up to let them in, he slides all the way over to the window without looking at Jon or asking what he wants. Jon hates the window seat. He hates the aisle seat less. The only seat he wouldn’t hate right now would be the one next to Lovett, but Lovett, who _could_ have asked the guy if he’d mind moving, didn’t—so Jon won’t, either.

Jon puts his bag under the seat in front of him. He buckles his seatbelt low and tight across his hips. Lovett always makes fun of him for doing this right away, instead of at the last minute when the flight attendant comes around to check—“You’ve got, like, fifteen minutes before you need to start freaking out, bud—” But right now, he says nothing. When Jon glances sidelong, he’s staring out the window, knee to his chest.

What Jon would love, right now, is a drink, or some benzos, or a time machine, a really _big_ time machine, one he could crank all the way back to—

He sits quietly thinking that one through, first from a geopolitical and then from a personal perspective, and hasn’t quite reached a conclusion when the attendants come out with their detached seat belts to remind him of all the ways he might die in flight.

Sometimes—when things are normal—he and Lovett play a game during this part, while the plane taxis out to the runway and the tension builds with nowhere to go. Lovett will elbow him, lean close, and pretend that the flight attendants gesturing up and down the aisles, trying on life vests and blowing plastic whistles, are playing charades. Lovett’s whispered guesses grow increasingly hammy and over-the-top when Jon starts to laugh, covering his face, never telling him to stop. Other times, Lovett just talks right through the safety announcements, breezy and big-mouthed, demanding all of Jon’s attention, so that there’s none left for worry.

Right now, though, when Jon glances over, Lovett isn’t even looking his way. He’s flipping through his copy of the Delta Sky Magazine, brow furrowed. As Jon watches, he hits the puzzle section and scowls, flips another page, emits an audible sigh of annoyance. The sight is so familiar that it catches in Jon’s throat. How many times has Lovett leaned across Jon, riffled through the seat pocket in front of him, ignoring a, “Hey,” or a, “You _could_ ask _nicely,_ ” to dig out Jon’s in-flight magazine and bark triumphantly at a clean Sudoku?

“No one’s ever done yours,” Lovett likes to remind him, settling into his seat peevishly, flipping his tray table down, creasing the magazine energetically to make it lay flat. “That’s how I _know_ the universe smiles upon you.”

Jon’s still watching as Lovett cuts his eyes to the middle seat pocket—then flicks them back to look at the guy in the middle seat—then back to the seat pocket—then—

On this final flick, he seems to realize he’s being watched, and stiffens, raising his eyes to meet Jon’s. He looks caught, a little, and shrugs, shaking his magazine lightly in Jon’s direction.

The thing about Lovett, Jon thinks as the captain announces over the PA that flight attendants should prepare for takeoff, is that—Jon’s heart is hammering—Jon just wouldn’t wanna do it without him. He wouldn’t want to do any of it.

Jon has a good life. Even now, when he wakes up worried all the time, it’s full of nice things: people he loves, moments of levity, work that matters. And still, among all these blessings, Lovett ranks first.

When the day starts with bad news, he still gets to drive to Starbucks with Lovett, bickering all the way. He gets to buy his coffee and hold the dogs’ leashes, pretending impatience, while Lovett scrambles around in the backseat trying to collect his things, which he habitually leaves scattered across every inch of Jon’s life.

And when the day ends with sick anticipation—C-SPAN on, still waiting for some vote or other—Lovett’s there waiting with him, scratching behind Leo’s ears as he lambasts Mitch McConnell, throwing his feet up onto the coffee table and interrupting himself to say, “Should we order food? Let’s order food,” meaning that _Jon_ should. Knowing that Jon will. He _likes_ that Lovett knows that. He wants to give Lovett everything—everything he wants—even the truly dumb stuff. Even right now, when everything is confused and messy, he wishes he could hand Lovett his in-flight magazine, lean his head on Lovett’s shoulder, and watch him doodle in the margins while he squints at the puzzle, trying to make it work.

It’s stupid, he thinks suddenly, to act like it’s complicated. It’s anything but. Lovett is just—it’s so simple—his best thing. His days start with Lovett and end with Lovett. For that, Jon can deal with the bad shit that happens in between.

Except: someday they won’t. That’s how this kind of thing works. They’re gonna go back to LA, leave all this behind, and in a week or a month or a year, Lovett’s gonna meet someone, click with him, and all those things Jon thinks of, fiercely, as his—they’ll belong to someone else. Someone else is going to get Lovett's glares, his quirking self-satisfied smile, his lush mouth to kiss as he comes; someone else is going to get to put his arm around Lovett in public without even thinking about it, pull him in and say, "This is Lovett," and say, "This is _my_ —"

“It wasn’t the snow,” he says abruptly, as the plane starts rumbling down the runway, picking up speed. This is the worst part of any flight—the sick anticipation building, the sound of all the engines revving up, the feeling that he could still maybe just—pull a lever, shout _stop_ , and call the whole thing off. Worst part of the flight, worst time to try and have a conversation like this: a conversation that means something. Means everything. But—sometimes, he thinks dimly, trying to swallow and finding his mouth dry, things just have to happen at the worst time. Otherwise they might not happen at all.

Lovett who’d been turning away, startles and stops. “What?”

“It wasn’t the _snow_ ,” Jon repeats. “It was you. It always is.”

“Always is me what?” Lovett says.

“ _Please_ don’t who’s-on-first-me right now,” Jon says and Lovett says, “I am _not_ , I am _confused_ ,” the tarmac blurring outside the window behind him.  

“Oh my God, we can just—we can talk about it later, let’s just talk about it later.”

“No, now I wanna talk about it now,” Lovett says insistently, and the plane takes off.

Jon’s stomach is falling out of his body and for once, it’s only half about the fact that there is _nothing_ connecting him safely to the ground anymore. “Later,” he says, clenching himself against the fear.

“ _Now_ ,” Lovett hisses.

“Lovett—”

“ _Always me what?”_ Lovett asks.  

“There’s someone sitting between us!” Jon says.

Behind Lovett, through the window with its raised shade, he can see the world falling away as the plane dips and rattles and climbs towards the clouds. It’s awful to watch—somehow, no matter how many times he does this, it never seems to get better—he should have taken some goddamn _drugs_ —but by the window is where Lovett is, so he doesn’t close his eyes, doesn’t turn away, doesn’t rest his elbows on his knees and stare down at the floor, counting down the minutes till landing. He keeps looking.

“You _started_ it!” Lovett says shrilly.

The guy sitting between them inclines his head towards Jon. “I don’t mind,” he tells Jon, _sotto voce._ “When my girlfriend gets like this, it’s usually better to let her have her way.”

“Uh,” Jon says.

“Aren’t you going to tell him,” Lovett says, after a moment, intently, “that you’re not my boyfriend?”

“I am _trying_ to _ask_ you to be!” Jon snaps.

The guy gives Jon a pitying look, and puts his headphones on.

Lovett looks like he’s been two-by-foured. His mouth is slightly ajar. “You,” he says, and then, “You can’t,” and then, like he’s trying to convince himself, “You said a dirty weekend! You said just a dirty weekend!”

“No, _you_ said just a dirty weekend! And please,” Jon says through gritted teeth, “stop shouting the phrase _dirty weekend_ on this plane.” Then: “Jesus, Tommy’s gonna kill us.” But he can’t—he can’t think about that, he can’t focus on that, while Lovett’s looking at him like this—intense, accusatory, some protected kernel of true feeling hidden beneath this prickling, if Jon could just _get_ at it—“I tried to tell you,” he says helplessly. “I said, when we get back to LA—”

“And _I_ said—”

“But I was right,” Jon says, shocking himself with how easily it comes out. “I was right, and you were wrong.”

“Do you think that’s a romantic thing to say?”

“I’m kinda figuring it out as I go,” Jon tells him.

Lovett goes to speak, then stops, then works his jaw a couple times. “Okay,” he says finally, “I just—for the record—”

“If there’s a record of any of this, I’ll shoot myself,” Jon tells him, clenching a hand on his thigh.

“—you have not used the words ‘will you be my boyfriend’ once in this conversation. Not that I want you to, since it makes us sound approximately thirteen years old, but—”

“—Will you be my boyfriend?” Jon says anyway.

“Yes,” Lovett says, without pause. “Wait, what?”

“Which of those was your answer?”

“Both,” Lovett says, and scowls. “ _Yes,_ like—who wouldn’t wanna be your stupid—Jesus—boyfriend—and _what,_ like you can’t possibly be asking me to be—to go steady while we approach cruising altitude on a flight out of Minneapolis after we spent the last four days snowed in and buddy-banging in a bed and breakfast.”

“Lovett,” Jon says—an inexplicable calm finally coming across him—“I grew up in Massachusetts. I’ve been snowed in a million times. The snow did not make me crazy. I don’t know how—it’s complicated, obviously, because we’re already so—but—I’m _right_ —”  

“It was _me_ ,” Lovett interrupts. He looks insane. His hair is a wreck. “ _I_ make you crazy!”

“...You have the listening comprehension of an ADHD-wracked four-year-old,” Jon tells him.

“Ex _actly_ ,” Lovett says.

“Exactly _what_?” Jon says. Lovett doesn’t respond or expand, just crosses his arms over his chest and blinks once, hard, his mouth a flat, frustrated line. Speak, man, Jon thinks wildly. Lovett doesn’t. “I don’t know what else you want me to say,” Jon tells him.

“I want you to tell me that you know dating me isn’t like living in Minnesota,” Lovett says abruptly. It comes out fast—faster even than most things his motor mouth produces. “I mean, most of the time. Aside from, like, the propensity for fried potato products.”

For a moment, Jon is only more confused than before. Then, as he stares at Lovett, at the defensive jut of his jaw, the picture shimmers and comes clear.

You’re scared, he thinks wonderingly. For a second it’s like he’s seeing Lovett as he was at twenty-six: slight frame, horrible haircut (“you’re one to talk—”), brash and prickly and lively and sullen by turns, unpredictable, engaging, purposefully repulsive—a push-me-pull-you of want and distrust. He’d reached out for Jon’s attention, rebuffed what he received; demanded to be included, refused to participate when inclusion was proffered.

At some point, a long time later, after they’d both moved out to LA, Jon had mentioned this—how bizarrely bipolar Lovett’s behavior had been in those early days—and Lovett had rolled his eyes, reaching over to spear a potato off Jon’s plate. “Well, excuse me for being a little gun-shy about fraternizing with a bunch of beefy, beer-pong-playing, Bud-Lite-crushing broskis.”

“You let that one get away from you,” Jon said.

“I know,” Lovett said.

“Fraternizing,” Jon said. “Beefy. Broskis.”

“I know, I know,” Lovett repeated, peevish, and Jon said, “I just thought you were funny. I wanted to be your friend.”

Jon has always been amazed by what happens to Lovett’s face when he’s happy and trying to hide it. “Right,” Lovett said, too soft, then too loud to compensate, “But like—did you wanna be my friend after hours in the office, because, you know, I was the only person there, or did you wanna be my friend out in, uh, public, like, at a baseball game with all your buds, or—”

“I just always wanted to be your friend,” Jon said again, ignoring the incredulous, get-a-load-of-this-simpleton look Lovett had fixed him with. “I don’t know why.” Then, as an afterthought: “And you would never have come to a baseball game.”

“Well—true,” Lovett had said.

“But if you ever wanna—” Jon said, shrugging, and got back at Lovett for the potato by swiping the celery stick out of his Bloody Mary.

And now—Jon blinks and it’s just Lovett, as he actually is, all these years later, the same tiny nasty niggling bit of grit in his gears: _what if you’re lying? What if you think you want me, then decide you don’t?_

Which—“Lovett,” Jon says, “you’re not Cap, and I’m not—” fuck—“Alfonso.”

Lovett gapes. “ _Almanzo_ ,” he says after an eternal moment.

“Okay, you don’t even know who Prince is—”

“That was a _joke!_ ”

“—and what I’m saying—”

“Please—”

“—is that I’m not gonna land in LA and say, hey, I forgot to tell you, I’m about to marry Laura—”

“Oh, _her_ you remember—”

“She _wrote_ them!” Jon says. “And _you’re_ not gonna die in a boiler explosion! We don’t have to just fuck once—”

“If you call this weekend once,” Lovett says, “you’re deranged—”

“—in a quintee—”

“Quinzee!”

“I forgot to Google it!” Jon says, “Sue me." He's leaning across the guy in the middle seat, who seems to be asleep. “We can do it again. And again. We can keep doing it—we can do it all summer—in a dugout—wherever—”

“The more period appropriate term would actually be sod house,” Lovett says.

Jon squints. “Are you fucking with me?”

“And none of that actually happened in the books,” Lovett says. He looks a little like he’s gonna barf. “You know that, right?”     

“I _know_ it won’t always be easy,” Jon says instead. Lovett’s wearing a t-shirt with a coffee stain covering half his chest, huge headphones around his neck. One earpiece is almost, but not quite, obscuring a hickey Jon sucked onto the soft skin there like a fucking horny bratty possessive teenager last night, _mine mine mine_. He looks stubborn, tense through the shoulders, and messy. Everything about him is absolutely unapologetic. Jon loves him so much that, for a moment, he almost doesn’t give a shit that he’s barreling through the air in a sardine tin. “I _know_ we won’t get snowed in a lot.”

“If you think we’ll _ever_ get snowed in in LA—”

“Shut up,” Jon says, not unkindly. There are about seventy things he could say; he’s not sure which is right, which will make it all clearest. But somehow the one that comes out is: “If you ran away to Alaska, I’d follow you.”

“—You’d what,” Lovett says flatly, and Jon says, eyes fixed on his face, “I’d follow you. I mean, I’d move to Alaska, too.”

“What are you gonna do in Alaska?”

“What are _you_ gonna do in Alaska?” Jon asks.

“Jon,” Lovett says. When no words naturally follow, he visibly swallows and restarts. “That’s super weird,” he says, but his face is—

“Yeah,” Jon says slowly. “I’m super weird about you.”

Lovett blinks. Jon wants, he thinks, to surprise him like this every day of his life.

“If the world is ending,” Jon says, holding his eyes, “I wanna go down with you. Okay? Every time.”

“Five dollars,” Lovett says, faint and almost puzzled, and Jon says, fervent, “I’ll give you fifty, the second we land, if you’ll just say yes again.” Impulsively, he holds out his hand. He tries to imagine what he must look like to Lovett, what Lovett sees when he looks at him. He hopes—

“Yes again,” Lovett says, and pulls a puzzled face, as if he’s surprised even himself. He reaches across the guy in the center seat to shake on it. The guy doesn’t stir; Jon can hear the sound of heavy metal emanating faintly from his headphones.

Lovett’s palm is damp. Touching him—even just a little—makes Jon’s thighs feel heavy, like he just downed a shot.  He can feel himself making a goopy expression at Lovett, who’s peering disbelievingly back.

“I kept accidentally imagining you in an American flag bikini,” he tells Lovett, for lack of anything better to say. “I asked you whether I should go for it and you said yes. Well. Kind of yes.” He doesn’t let go of Lovett’s hand.

Lovett’s face undergoes a series of complicated transformations, but seems finally to land on charmed. He squeezes Jon’s fingers and wriggles a little in his seat. Jon wants to slap his ass, wants to embrace him from behind, trapping his arms at his sides, and kiss the soft back of his neck so that he shudders, he wants to bite his lower lip and his nipple, both nipples, and make him whine and shriek and groan and shout. He wants to fall asleep holding him and wake up holding him and take fifty-seven pictures of his back dimples and his soft dick and his slack mouth, then delete all of them, probably, for security’s sake, but _still_. He squeezes Lovett’s fingers back.

“You _are_ a pervert,” Lovett says wonderingly. “It’s fine.”  Jon has to strain to hear him over the sound of the engines. “You’re gonna give me your letterman jacket, and I’m irresistible. Imagine me any way you want.”

“I don’t have a letterman jacket,” Jon tells him apologetically.

“Shhhhh,” Lovett murmurs— _hypocrite—_ “Don’t spoil this for me,” and keeps holding his hand as the plane bears onwards into the blue.

 

 

“How was your—”

“Jon and I had _sex_!”

“—weekend,” Tommy continues, apparently unfazed.

“ _Dirty_ weekend!” Lovett says with relish.

Tommy’s—still just looking at his screen. He frowns at something and leans in closer, types something and leans back. “The meetings went great, by the way,” he says. “Thanks for asking.”

“ _Sex_!” Lovett shouts.

“Yeah,” Tommy says, “I get it, you’ve got _ideas_ —”

“Great ideas! Ideas that Jon loved! We got lost in a snowstorm and I bought a novelty dog bust that looks just like Karl Rove—”

“Uh huh,” Tommy says.

“—and then Jon told me he’s _crazy_ about me, and always has been, and we did it seventeen ways from Sunday all over the B &B and we probably would have tried some rope stuff but I didn’t think to bring any because, you know—”

“Uh-huh,” Tommy says again.

“—who could’ve seen it coming?”

“Mmm,” Tommy says.

“It was _filthy_ ,” Lovett concludes, hoisting himself up onto the counter and beaming across at Jon. Jon tries to give him a quelling look, but his face has been oscillating between astonished and indulgent ever since Lovett took his hand a couple miles above Minnesota. He turns his gaze up to the ceiling, instead, to try and keep himself from doing anything too gross.

“Okay,” Tommy says. Jon can hear him typing, rapid-fire. He sounds distracted. “Sure. Jon, you couldn’t at least have stuck him in a snowbank for a little while to slow his processors down, or—?”

Jon doesn’t say anything.

After a silent moment, Tommy’s fingers slow on the keyboard. “Jon,” he says. There’s a heavy silence. “Oh my God.”

Jon keeps staring at the ceiling.  

“Oh,” Tommy says, “my _God!_ ”

“Seventeen ways!”

“ _Jon_!”

“Jon, tell him!”

There’s a little stain in the shape of an ear near the overhead light. Jon examines it and thinks, pleasantly lightheaded, about happenstance, good and bad; about how things happen, causing other things to happen, happening into happening into happiness. He thinks about learning what you want when you get it, about the crinkly corners of Lovett’s eyes and crisp white sheets on a four-poster and the way snow looks, thick and freshly fallen beneath a clear sky, a bright moon.

“It _was_ filthy,” he agrees, smiling in spite of himself, and when Tommy yelps and Lovett crows and the two of them start talking so loudly over each other that it nearly cancels out into white noise, Jon starts to laugh, and laughs and laughs and laughs, covering his face with his hand, and thinks, at no one in particular, _Thanks_ , and waits to be dragged back into the fray.

**Author's Note:**

> Incredibly uncool outro: [a self-indulgent accompanying playlist](https://8tracks.com/longnationalnightmare/we-built-another-world). Exit, pursued by bear.


End file.
